Alexandre Cabanel: 105 Paintings

Alexandre Cabanel (1823 – 1889) was a French painter who painted historical, classical and religious subjects in the academic style. He was also famous as a portrait painter. According to Diccionario Enciclopedico Salvat, Cabanel is the best representative of the L'art pompier and Napoleon III's preferred painter. His work displays originality and sincerity fixed with a deep sense of respect for the great art of the past. His drawing is excellent, expressive and informed by personal selection, knowledge and a quest for both natural and ideal beauty. His design is sophisticated and his color is pleasant, natural, and ornamental, as needed. His method varies from smooth naturalistic to virtuoso paint handling. He was an artist of truth, a positive and competent master of his art.
Cabanel entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris at the age of seventeen, studied with François-Edouard Picot and exhibited at the Paris Salon for the first time in 1844. He won the Prix de Rome scholarship in 1845 at the age of twenty two was elected a member of the Institute in 1863. Cabanel was appointed professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1864 and taught there until his death. He won the Grande Medaille d'Honneur at the Salons of 1865, 1867, and 1878 and was closely connected to the Paris Salon: "He was elected regularly to the Salon jury and his pupils could be counted by the hundred at the Salons. Through them, Cabanel did more than any other artist of his generation to form the character of belle epoque French painting". His refusal together with William-Adolphe Bouguereau to allow the impressionist painter Edouard Manet and many other painters to exhibit their work in the Salon of 1863 led to the establishment of the Salon des Refuses by the French government.
A successful academic painter, his 1863 painting The Birth of Venus is one of the best known examples of 19th century academic painting. The picture was bought by the emperor Napoleon III; there is also a smaller replica (painted in 1875 for a banker, John Wolf) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. It was gifted to them by Wolf in 1893.