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