"...absolutely SPEECHLESS after being engrossed in your masterpiece work showcasing Bouguereau

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"...absolutely SPEECHLESS after being engrossed in your masterpiece work showcasing Bouguereau

4 December, 2010

...in such a spectacular, fresh approach and in a manner deserved of the greatest artist that ever lived!"
Dear Mr. Ross,

WHY did it take me two days to email you about your Herculean accomplishment, namely the William Bouguereau Catalog Raisonne? There is only one answer: my husband and I were absolutely SPEECHLESS after being engrossed in your masterpiece work showcasing Bouguereau in such a spectacular, fresh approach and in a manner deserved of the greatest artist that ever lived!

I will try to relay our thoughts into words...Your introduction is a superb work in itself, touching on many issues never approached by today's supposed art history scholars: ending rumors and outright lies about William Bouguereau as a "villain of the modernist movement"; stating the fact that this Bouguereau raisonne is a "roadmap" for future historians; the chasm between cultural, societal and political history and art history; the irony of the importance of social and political issues of poverty, indigence, and the like, to writers contemporary to Bouguereau, yet those same subjects were considered by art critics to be banal, stylized, insipid and irrelevant for Bouguereau and his realist contemporaries.... an interesting juxtaposition...The all-too true "mindless standard" that ruined Realist art's reputation.

Your points are precise, affirmed by documented facts, and well taken by the reader; they set the tone for the two volume triumph. You are speaking to the reader, not at the reader, in a refreshing cadence unlike most verbose scholarly publications.

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