The Birth of Venus

Cabanel completed this canvas in 1863 and exhibited it at the Salon de Paris, the very same year Édouard Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe was rejected from the official Salon and shown instead at the Salon des Refusés. The contrast between the two paintings defines a pivotal fault line in nineteenth-century French art: where Manet placed a nude in an uncomfortably modern, confrontational context, Cabanel cloaked his in the safe mythology of classical antiquity, and the Salon jury rewarded him accordingly. Emperor Napoleon III purchased the painting directly from the exhibition, cementing Cabanel's status as the most celebrated académicien of his generation. The work now resides in the collection of the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, and has become one of the defining documents of French Academic painting at its apex: a painting as much about institutional power and aesthetic politics as it is about myth. Cabanel was forty years old at the time, at the height of his influence, and this canvas effectively secured his position as a preferred portraitist and history painter to the Second Empire court.