William-Adolphe Bouguereau (French William-Adolphe Bouguereau [buɡ(ə)ʁo]; November 30, 1825, La Rochelle - August 19, 1905, ibid.) was a French painter, a prominent representative of the salon academism of the 19th century.

His work can be characterized as "the quintessence of painting of his generation." The catalogs include 828 paintings by Bouguereau, mainly on mythological, allegorical and biblical subjects. Researchers classify his work as the so-called "romantic realism", since, following the methods of romanticism, he preferred to paint from life and reproduced the appearance of his models with photographic accuracy. Despite being faithful to academic principles, in particular, the primacy of drawing over color, in the 1890s he was influenced by symbolism, which he interpreted as a method of revealing the essence of the depicted person with the help of minor details that carry a semantic load.