I’m departing from the norms of this column by starting with a brief discussion of a 19th-century painter. But I promise that Guillaume-Adolphe Bouguereau is relevant to today’s Washington politics.
In the third quarter of the 19th century, Bouguereau’s painstakingly realistic classical works were all the rage. He was a lion of the French Academy, and his paintings were especially popular with American industrial magnates, who commissioned them for what were then astronomical sums.
As the third quarter of the century closed, however, in the short time it took to bring his paintings across the Atlantic Ocean, they were rendered worthless. The coup de grâce against Bouguereau was delivered by the Impressionists, who took the art world by storm in Paris in 1874.
Their work implicitly mocked Bouguereau’s lovingly sentimental renderings of beautiful mothers and pristine urchins. Overnight, these became passé embarrassments to their owners. Today, the whereabouts of many Bouguereau works are unknown because no one bothered to keep track of them for a century. They still turn up in yard sales.
This ignominy should foster sympathy for the plight of the 46th president’s son, Hunter Bouguereau — sorry, Biden — whose art sales vanished in a puff of Democratic electoral defeat. Once it was clear that Hunter’s sugar daddy would be ousted from the White House, feckless connoisseurs, who’d paid an average of $54,000 for 27 works sold during his father’s presidency, found them aesthetically offensive. Now, Hunter can’t give his masterpieces away.
The young dauber, having doffed his paint-smeared jacket and raffish beret, told this tale of betrayal to a California judge recently, whom he asked to dismiss his lawsuit against one of the nasty people who distributed the blush-making contents of the laptop he left in a repair shop. He cannot afford to pursue justice against his political persecutors because, like other dissolute creative geniuses, Hunter has racked up “significant debt in the millions of dollars range.”
In court papers, Hunter said, “Given the positive feedback and reviews of my artwork and memoir, I was expecting to obtain paid speaking engagements and paid appearances, but that has not happened.”
Allegiances in politics, as in the art world, are flimsy, and yesterday’s hero is likely to be today’s schmuck not because he is inherently less admirable — in Hunter’s case, that would be a tough assignment — but because the world moves on and you’re peddling buggy whips in the age of Tesla Cybertrucks.
FOR HUNTER, THE BIDEN BUSINESS GOES BUST
Hunter’s collapse into financial embarrassment is an object lesson in the grift of the Washington swamp. The creatures here make gazillions of dollars either for themselves or for their relatives by sharing razor-sharp investment tips with their husbands while working on congressional legislation, or scoring multimillion-dollar contracts from progressive publishers for dreary tomes no one will read, or advising Eastern oligarchs while presidential papa is sitting next to them.
It’s not a pretty sight. But then, nor are some of yesterday’s art treasures.
