Alexandre Cabanel Biography | Oil Painting Reproductions

Alexandre Cabanel painted historical, classical and religious subjects in the Academic style, he was likewise notable as a portrait painter. Cabanel is the best representative of the L'art Pompier and Napoleon III's favored painter.

He entered the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris at the young age of seventeen. Cabanel studied with noted painter François-Édouard Picot. His first exhibition was at the Paris Salon in 1844, he won the Prix de Rome scholarship the following year, at the young age of only twenty-two. Alexandre Cabanel was elected into the Institute in 1863 and became a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1864, teaching there the rest of his life. Cabanel won the Grande Médaille d'Honneur at the Salons of 1865, 1867, and 1878.

He was very closely associated to the Paris Salon. 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.

A successful academic painter, Alexandre Cabanel 1863 painting The Birth of Venus is one of the best-known cases of the nineteenth century academic painting. The original painting is in the collection of the Luxembourg museum, etchings, photos, and reproduction oil paintings have made it world famous as one of the classics of modern art. The picture was bought by the Emperor Napoleon III; there is also a smaller replica painted in 1875 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

He was also a portrait painter of the first order, especially of women, and no small part of his extensive fortune came to him from his commissions in this line, a hefty portion of his sitters being Americans.

Art Movement History: Academic.
Artists Influencing Alexandre Cabanel: François-Édouard Picot.
Painters Alexandre Cabanel Influenced: François Flameng, Louis Mettling, Jules Bastien-Lepage, Émile Friant, Vlaho Bukovac, Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant.
Artist's Biography compiled by Albert L. Mansour at The World's Artist, with text adapted from Wikipedia.