| Alexandre
Cabanel (1823-1889) was a painter of portraits and historical subjects
in the academic style. He entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris at
the age of seventeen. He exhibited at the Salon for the first time in 1844,
and won the Prix de Rome in 1845. His painting 'Naissance de Venus', was
shown at the Salon in 1863, and was bought by Napoleon III for his own
personal collection. That same year he was made a professor of the Ecole
des Beaux-Arts. Cabanel's erotic imagery, cloaked in historicism, appealed
to the propriety of the higher levels of society. He was a determined opponent
of the Impressionists, especially Manet, although the refusal of the academic
establishment to realize the importance of new ideas and sources of inspiration
would eventually prove to be the undoing of the Academy.
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