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.