Alexandre Cabanel

Alexandre Cabanel, a carpenter's son from Montpellier, trained at the École des Beaux-Arts and won the Prix de Rome in 1845. He painted history, religious and mythological subjects and fashionable portraits with a smooth, polished finish. His Birth of Venus was bought by Napoleon III at the Salon of 1863, the year Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe hung in the Salon des Refusés. As a teacher and Salon juror he shaped French academic painting for decades.