The Birth of Venus (Cabanel)

Alexandre Cabanel · 1863

The story

The Birth of Venus (French: Naissance de Venus) is a painting by the French artist Alexandre Cabanel. It was painted in 1863, and is now in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. A second and smaller version (85 x 135.9 cm) from c. 1864 is in the Dahesh Museum of Art. A third (106 x 182.6 cm) version dates from 1875; it is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Shown to great success at the Paris Salon of 1863, The Birth of Venus was immediately purchased by Napoleon III for his own personal collection. That same year Cabanel was made a professor of the École des Beaux-Arts.

Cabanel's sensual goddess exemplifies the graceful forms and classically-derived subject matter valued by the conservative French Salon, which was beginning to be challenged by artists focusing on scenes and ideas from modern life. Art historian and curator Robert Rosenblum wrote of Cabanel's The Birth of Venus that "This Venus hovers somewhere between an ancient deity and a modern dream"; he described "the ambiguity of her eyes, that seem to be closed but that a close look reveals that she is awake ... A nude who could be asleep or awake is specially formidable for a male viewer."

Artist: Alexandre Cabanel
Date: 1863
Collection: Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France
Movement: academic art
Medium: oil paint, canvas
Size: 130 × 225 cm

Story adapted from the Wikipedia article and its contributors, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Facts from Wikidata (CC0). Image: Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.

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