Beginnings

Alexandre Cabanel

The Birth of Venus

1875

Oil on canvas, 106 × 182.6 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

A smaller replica, by Cabanel himself, of the nude that drew crowds at the 1863 Salon. It shows the polished academic manner the future Impressionists were judged against.

• Academic painters smoothed away their brushstrokes, as Cabanel does here. The Impressionists did the opposite and left their strokes visible on purpose.
• The first version was a hit of the 1863 Salon, and Napoleon III bought it.
• The New York collector John Wolfe ordered this replica from Cabanel in 1875.
• Look at the cupids overhead: the myth gives the nude a setting the Salon accepted.
• Wolfe gave it to the Met in 1893.

In Greek myth, Venus was born from the foam of the sea. Salon painters used such stories to show the nude as an ideal, not a real woman.

Replica

A copy an artist makes of his own earlier work.

Image: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Open Access · CC0