Alexandre Cabanel

Alexandre Cabanel (28 September 1823 – 23 January 1889) was a French painter. 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 L'art pompier, and was Napoleon III's preferred painter.
Biography
Cabanel entered the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris at the age of seventeen,
and studied with François-Édouard Picot. He exhibited at the Paris Salon for the first time in 1844, and won the Prix de Rome scholarship in 1845 at the age of 22. Cabanel was elected a member of the Institute in 1863. He was appointed professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1864 and taught there until his death.
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". His refusal together with William-Adolphe Bouguereau to allow the impressionist painter Édouard Manet and many other painters to exhibit their work in the Salon of 1863 led to the establishment of the Salon des Refusés by the French government. Cabanel won the Grande Médaille d'Honneur at the Salons of 1865, 1867, and 1878.
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 given to them by Wolf in 1893. The composition embodies ideals of Academic art: mythological subject, graceful modeling, silky brushwork, and perfected form. This style was perennially popular with collectors, even as it was challenged by artists seeking a more personal interpretation of truth to nature, such as Courbet.
Pupils
His pupils included:
Rodolfo Amoedo
Joseph Aubert
Henry Bacon
George Randolph Barse
Alexandre Jean-Baptiste Brun
Jean-Eugène Buland
Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant
Vlaho Bukovac
Gaston Bussière
Louis Capdevielle
Eugène Carrière
Eugène Chigot
Jacqueline Comerre-Paton
Fernand Cormon
Pierre Auguste Cot
Kenyon Cox
Édouard Debat-Ponsan
Louis Deschamps (painter)
Émile Friant
François Guiguet
Jules Bastien-Lepage
François Flameng
Charles Fouqueray
Frank Fowler
Henri Gervex
Charles Lucien Léandre
Max Leenhardt
Henri Le Sidaner
Aristide Maillol
João Marques de Oliveira
Jan Monchablon
Georges Moreau de Tours
Henri Pinta
Henri Regnault
Iakovos Rizos
Louis Royer
Jean-Jacques Scherrer
António Silva Porto
Edward Stott
Joseph-Noël Sylvestre
Solomon Joseph Solomon
Paul Tavernier
José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior
Étienne Terrus
Adolphe Willette
Selected works
The Fallen Angel (L'ange déchu, 1847), Musée Fabre, Montpellier
Aglaé and Boniface (Aglaé et Boniface, 1857), The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio USA
The Birth of Venus (La naissance de Vénus, 1863), Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Napoleon III (1865), Musée national du château de Compiègne, Écouen, France
The Death of Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta (La mort de Francesca de Rimini et de Paolo Malatesta, 1870), Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Portrait de la comtesse de Keller (1873), Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Thamar (1875)
Phèdre (1880), Musée Fabre, Montpellier
Ruth glanant dans les champs de Booz (1886), Musée Garinet, Châlons-en-Champagne
Portrait de Mary Victoria Leiter (1887), Kedleston Hall, England,
Cleopatra Testing Poisons on Condemned Prisoners (Cléopâtre essayant des poisons sur des condamnés à mort, 1887), Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp
Gallery
References
External links
Alexandre Cabanel at Artcyclopedia
Paintings of Alexandre Cabanel on Insecula
Alexandre Cabanel at the Art Renewal Center
Alexandre Cabanel at The Art in Pixels
Alexandre Cabanel at alexandrecabanel.com
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/110000264
1823 births
1889 deaths
19th-century French painters
French male painters
Artists from Montpellier
French romantic painters
French neoclassical painters
Prix de Rome for painting
Academic art
Academic staff of the École des Beaux-Arts
Members of the Académie des beaux-arts
Members of the Royal Academy of Belgium
19th-century French male artists