Birth of Venus
Alexandre Cabanel, 1863
with François-Edouard Picot at Ecole des Beaux-Arts (Paris); French Academy in Rome
1843 – first Paris Salon; runner up in Prix de Rome competition; travels to Rome
1850s –commission for decorative paintings for the Hôtel de Ville (city hall, destroyed 1871) and the Louvre
1855 – receives Légion d’honneur
1863 – exhibits Birth of Venus at Salon, it is purchased by Napoleon III; appointed professor at Ecole des Beaux-Arts; elected to the Institut de France
1865 – wins Grand Medal of Honor at Salon (also in 1867 and 1878)
Jules Bastien-Lepage, Henri Gervex, and Lodewijk Royer
Rome (1840s)
Ludwig II (King of Bavaria); Napoleon III (Emperor of France)
Nymph Abducted by a Faun, 1860 (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille)
The Death of Francesca de Rimini and Paolo Malatesta, 1870 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris). A Dante subject.
Although Cabanel is not a household name today, he was famous in his time:
"Next to Meissionier, it probable that the best known in the United States of the French artists of the day is Alexandre Cabanel.”
Lucy H. Hooper, “Contemporary French Artists. Meissonier and Cabanel,” The Art Journal, vol. 5 (1879): 286.
Boime, Albert. Art in an Age of Civil Struggle, 1848-1871. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007
Genge, Gabriele. “Geschichte(n) um Cabanels Naissance de Venus von 1863: Körper als Text und Bild,“ Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, vol. 65, no. 2 (2002): 221-31 (in German)
Shaw, Jennifer. “The Figure of Venus: Rhetoric of the Ideal and the Salon of 1863,” in Caroline Arscott, and Katie Scott, eds., Manifestations of Venus. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001, pp. 90-108