Alexandre Cabanel was a French academic painter, born in Montpellier in 1823, who died in Paris in 1889. His Birth of Venus, shown at the Paris Salon of 1863, was bought by Emperor Napoleon III, and he was one of the most successful painters of the Second Empire. He is remembered today for two pictures: that Venus, and the Fallen Angel, a furious Lucifer glaring over his arm that he painted in 1847.
The Venus made his name. The angel is the one people look for now, and the two paintings do not mean what you might expect.
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The emperor bought the Venus in 1863. The Fallen Angel, sixteen years older, is the painting people look for now. It would be natural to guess that the first belongs to a man at the top of his profession and the second to a student who had not yet learned the rules.
It is the other way around. The Venus was the picture of a man who had learned the rules perfectly, and one of the best-known writers of the day mocked it for exactly that. The angel was painted by a student, and the men who judged it said he had broken them. One of those two verdicts was the one he wanted.
What You'll Discover
What his first judges held against it.
Why the emperor bought this Venus.
What Zola said she was made of.
Who his jury really kept out.
Who learned to paint in his studio.
Who paid for him in New York.