Alexandre Cabanel

Alexandre Cabanel was one of the most successful painters of France's Second Empire, an artist of polished mythological, religious and historical scenes and of society portraits. In the gallery he is represented by Fallen Angel (L'Ange déchu, 1847), his tearful, defiant Lucifer, in the Musée Fabre, Montpellier.

Life

Cabanel was born in Montpellier on 28 September 1823, the son of a carpenter, and trained at the local school of fine arts. In 1840 he entered the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris as a pupil of François-Édouard Picot, and in 1845, at 22, he won the Prix de Rome, which took him to the Villa Medici until 1850. Fallen Angel was painted there as one of his works sent back from Rome.

His breakthrough was The Birth of Venus at the Salon of 1863, bought at once by Napoleon III and now in the Musée d'Orsay. That year he was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, and in 1864 became a professor at the École, where he taught until his death. He sat on the Salon jury seventeen times and won its Medal of Honor in 1865, 1867 and 1878. He died in Paris on 23 January 1889 and was buried in Montpellier.

Style

Cabanel embodied the academic ideal: a literary subject, refined drawing, porcelain-smooth finish and idealized form. Critics such as Émile Zola mocked that perfection, and Cabanel is often cast as the villain of the story of modern art because his jury helped reject Manet in 1863, the year of the Salon des Refusés. Yet his pupils numbered in the hundreds, among them Pierre Auguste Cot.

Key works

Fallen Angel (1847), The Birth of Venus (1863), The Death of Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta (1870) and Cleopatra Testing Poisons on Condemned Prisoners (1887, Antwerp) are among his best-known paintings. Fallen Angel is unusual for its psychology: Lucifer hides his mouth behind his arm, and a single tear sits in his eye.

Where to see his work

The Musée Fabre in Montpellier and the Musée d'Orsay hold his major works. See also fallen angels in art and Academic art.