Alexandre Cabanel  

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Alexandre Cabanel (28 September 1823–23 January 1889) was a French painter, best-known for his rendition of The Birth of Venus. Cabanel is representative of the L'art pompier.

Cabanel was born in Montpellier, Hérault. He painted historical, classical and religious subjects in the academic style. He was also well-known 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.

He entered the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris at the age of seventeen. Cabanel studied with François-Édouard Picot and exhibited at the Paris Salon for the first time in 1844, and won the Prix de Rome scholarship in 1845 at the age of twenty two. Cabanel was elected a member of the Institute in 1863 and appointed professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in the same year.

Cabanel won the Grande Médaille d'Honneur at the Salons of 1865, 1867, and 1878.

He 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 époque French painting" (Dictionary of Art (1996)). His refusal together with William-Adolphe Bouguereau to allow the impressionist painter Édouard Manet and other painters to exhibit their work in the Salon of 1863 lead to the establishment of the Salon des Refusés.

A successful academic painter, his 1863 painting 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.

Pupils

His pupils include:

List of selected works

• The Death of Moses (1851), Dahesh Museum, New York City. New York, USA
• Nymph and Satyr (Nymphe et Satyr, 1860), Private collection
• The Birth of Venus (1863), Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
• The Death of Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta (1870), Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
• La Comtesse de Keller (1873), Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
• Phèdre (1880), Musée Fabre, Montpellier
• Ophelia (1883), Private collection
• Ruth glanant dans les champs de Booz, (1886), Musée Garinet, Châlons-en-Champagne
• Lady Curzon (1887), Kedleston Hall, England,
• Preparatory study of Cleopatra for Cleopatra Testing Poisons on Condemned Prisoners, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Béziers,</small>
• Cleopatra Testing Poisons on Condemned Prisoners (1887), Private collection
• Eve After the Fall, Private Collection
• The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Paradise, Private Collection