First Reverie
Première rêverie (English: First Reverie), also known in English as Whisperings of Love, is a painting by nineteenth-century French artist William-Adolphe Bouguereau. The work was completed in 1889 and is held at the New Orleans Museum of Art.
Première rêverie, which measures 157.48 x 92.71 cm (62 x 36 1/2 in), features a young woman sitting on rock with a vase beneath her arm and a Cupid whispering into her ear. The model for this painting, whose identity is unknown, also featured in Bouguereau's Boucles d'oreilles (1889–90), Le Travail interrompu (1891; Mead Art Museum), and Daphnis et Chloe.
Bouguereau completed Première rêverie in early 1889, naming it Le chant de l'Amour (The Song of Love). In May of that year the work was sold to the art dealership Tooth and Sons and renamed Première rêverie. That August the dealership sold the painting to a person named Groves. The painting was later gifted to the New Orleans Museum of Art by Mr. and Mrs. Chapman H. Hyams; the museum's catalogue lists it as Whisperings of Love. Eyewitness Books' guide to New Orleans lists the painting as one of the top ten exhibits at the museum and Christie's considers the work one of Bouguereau's more important contemporary paintings.
In late 1889, Gustave Doyen, with some input from the Bouguereau, completed a reduction of Première rêverie; this work, measuring 101 by 58 centimetres (40 in × 23 in), is now housed at the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens. A print of Bougureau's painting, produced by John Douglas Miller, is held at the Art Institute of Chicago under the title The First Whisper of Love, this title had previously been attached to the reduction when it was sold by Tooth and Sons.
Source and Courtesy : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premi%C3%A8re_r%C3%AAverie
Bouguereau's works were eagerly bought by American millionaires who considered him the most important French artist of that time. For example, Nymphs and Satyr was purchased first by John Wolfe, then sold by his heiress Catharine Lorillard Wolfe to hotelier Edward Stokes, who displayed it in New York City's Hoffman House Hotel. Two paintings by Bouguereau in the Nob Hill mansion of Leland Stanford were destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906. Gold Rush tycoon Ben Ali Haggin and his family, who normally eschewed the nude, made an exception for Bouguereau's Nymphaeum.
