Alexandre Cabanel

Alexandre Cabanel ( September 28 1823 - January 23 1889 ) was a French painter .

Cabanel was born in Montpellier in the department of Herault . He painted historical, classical and religious scenes in the academic style, and was also a well known portrait painter. Cabanel is one of the main representatives of the so-called art pompier . He was the favorite painter of Emperor Napoleon III .

At seventeen he began to follow lessons at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Cabanel studied with François-Édouard Picot and suggested for the first time exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1844. In 1845 he won the second prize of Rome, at the age of twenty-two. Cabanel was elected a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1863, and was appointed in the same year as professor at the École des Beaux Arts.

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

He had excellent connections with the Parisian salon . He was a regular part of the jury, and hundreds of his students were exhibiting at the show. When he and William-Adolphe Bouguereau refused to allow a number of artists, including Edouard Manet, this led to the establishment of the Salon des Refuses .

His painting The Birth of Venus 1863 is one of the most famous examples of academic painting. This work grew out of a myth with the goddess Venus.Het work was purchased by the emperor Napoleon III ; a smaller copy of the work, painted in 1875 for an American banker, is on display in New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Pupils
Cabanel had many students, including:
 * Rodolfo Amoedo
 * Jean Joseph Benjamin Constant
 * Albert Besnard
 * Vlaho Bukovac
 * Charles Bulteau
 * Gaston Bussière
 * Louis Capdevielle
 * Eugène Carrière
 * Fernand Cormon
 * Pierre Auguste Cot
 * Edouard Debat-Ponsan
 * Émile Friant
 * François Guiguet
 * Jules Bastien Lepage
 * François Flameng
 * Charles Fouqueray
 * Henri Gervex
 * Charles Lucien Léandre
 * Henri Le Sidaner
 * Aristide Maillol
 * Édouard-Antoine Marsal
 * João Marques de Oliveira
 * Henri Regnault
 * Louis Royer
 * Jean-Jacques Scherrer
 * António da Silva Porto
 * Joseph-Noël Sylvestre
 * Solomon Solomon Joesph
 * Paul Tavernier
 * François Thévenot
 * Étienne Terrus
 * Louis Tytgadt
 * Adolphe Willette

List of famous works [ edit ]
The Birth of Venus (1863)
 * La Mort de Moise (1851), Dahesh Museum , New York .
 * Louis XIII et Richelieu (1856), Palais du Luxembourg , Paris .
 * Nymphe et Satyre (1860), private collection.
 * La Naissance de Venus (1863), Musée d'Orsay , Paris .
 * La Mort de Françoise de Rimini et Paolo Malatesta (1870), Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
 * La Comtesse de Keller (1873), Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
 * Phèdre (1880), Musee Fabre , Montpellier .
 * Ophélie (1883), private collection.
 * Ruth glanant dans les champs de Booz, (1886), Musée Garinet, Chalons-en-Champagne .
 * Cleopatra poison trials by prisoners sentenced to death (1887), Royal Museum of Fine Arts , Antwerp .
 * Ève Après la chute, private collection.
 * Adam et Ève chasses du Paradis, private collection.
 * La vie de saint Louis , Pantheon Paris