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Cabanel was born in Montpellier, Hérault. He painted historical, classical and religious subjects in the academic style. He was also well-known as a portrait painter. According to Diccionario Enciclopedico Salvat, Cabanel is the best representative of the L'art pompier and Napoleon III preferred painter[1].
He entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris at the age of seventeen. Cabanel studied with François-Édouard Picot and exhibited at the Paris Salon for the first time in 1844, and won the Prix de Rome scholarship in 1845 at the age of twenty two. Cabanel was elected a member of the Institute in 1863 and appointed professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in the same year.
Cabanel won the Grande Médaille d'Honneur at the Salons of 1865, 1867, and 1878.
He was closely connected to the Paris Salon: "He was elected regularly to the Salon jury and his pupils could be counted by the hundred at the Salons. Through them, Cabanel did more than any other artist of his generation to form the character of belle époque French painting" [2]. His refusal together with William-Adolphe Bouguereau to let the impresionists in the Salon lead to the establishement of the Salon des Refusés.
Echo, 1874 Oil on canvas - Metropolitan Museum
Nymph and Satyr.1860Oil on canvas
Subject matter, 'Nudity':
It's very difficult to find works that are able to materialize the fantastic conjunction of the Nude with Art. Only a few masters in the history of art were able to pass this test. The true essence of art is beauty, joined with the sensuality of the nude, often confused with vulgarity. Nudity is always disquieting, instigating and surprising. So the artist, both in painting and in sculpture, in dancing or in photography, discovers in the nude a profound link with the pureness of being. Sensuality stimulates creativity in every sense. Sensuality also evokes love, passion and the creation of man. This is why nudity moves us so profoundly. Appreciate the artistic nude with representations by the principal masters and artists of art history.
Painting Techniques:
Paintings are the products of a certain time and certain place, and art history naturally attempts to place these works in their larger setting. Anyone studying western art, for example, will learn to recognize the styles of the Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic and Modern periods, and to understand the complex interplay of thought, patronage, society and economic issues that the paintings represent. It is to such an understanding that art critics refer when they insist that art today must engage with contemporary issues.
Line design
Woven out of relationships of shape and outline. Dominant between decline of Roman Empire and Renaissance. May be unrealistic (Book of Hours) or realistic (Flemish Gothic). Legible element distinct from illusionist. Stereotype and non-personal symbols generally employed. Outlines emphasized by color changes. Areas filled by pattern. Popular for narrative, when features irrelevant to storytelling are omitted. Hidden geometry important. Flowing brush strokes only in illuminated MSS (unlike far-eastern art.) Development from late Roman to Byzantine and to Gothic is not based on direct observation. Symbols are distorted for religious effect.
Involved the third dimension, often running in counterpoint to a line design as well. Both decorative and descriptive. Intricate and subtle patterns built up by interweaving forms in space, speeding up, slowing and stopping the recession as desired. Artist studied nature to elucidate construction of forms in space, and to relate them rhythmically. Construction uses tone or line, the latter indicating axial and sectional lineaments. Perspective helps. Artists think in the round.
Aimed at a. creating a satisfying pattern out of degrees of light and shade and b. representing perceptual truth more closely by some pictorial convention that represents the eye's varying sharpness of focus. Lasted early 16th to early 19th centuries. Artists were more concerned with tone than color. Where important, as in Venetian painting, color was generally used decoratively. Willingness to sacrifice detail in areas 'out of focus' meant that brushwork could vigorous and free, adding life and sparkle to the painting.
Color Design
Final stage in cycle of pictorial realism. Color had always played an important part in painting but not until nineteenth century were painters prepared to make drastic sacrifices on tone and precise delineation. Harmony was the object — achieved by some relationship of warm and cold (i.e. red or blue bias) or color saturation (e.g. a brilliant orange, dark brown, warmish gray and flesh pink are all orange either neat, reduced in tonal intensity, desaturated and reduced in intensity and desaturated respectively — i.e. orange with nothing, black, gray or white added.) Form tended to be lost and dim interiors were banished for bright landscapes. Finest landscape school was the English of first half of nineteenth century — helped by Rubens' experiments, atmospheric renderings of Poussin and Claude, and rustic motifs from Dutch painters.
19th century: Neo-classicism, Romanticism, Impressionism
After the decadence of Rococo there arose in the late 18th century an ascetic neo-classicism, best represented by such artists as Jacques Louis David and his heir Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. Ingres' work already contains much of the sensuality, but none of the spontaneity, that was to characterize Romanticism. This movement turned its attention toward landscape and nature as well as the human figure and the supremacy of natural order above mankind's will. There is a pantheist philosophy (see Spinoza and Hegel) within this conception that opposes Enlightenment ideals by seeing mankind's destiny in a more tragic or pessimistic light. The idea that human beings are not above the forces of Nature is in contradiction to Ancient Greek and Renaissance ideals where mankind was above all things and owned his fate. This thinking led romantic artists to depict the sublime, ruined churches, shipwrecks, massacres and madness.
Romantic painters turned landscape painting into a major genre, considered until then as a minor genre or as a decorative background for figure compositions. Some of the major painters of this period are Eugene Delacroix, Théodore Géricault, J. M. W. Turner, Caspar David Friedrich and John Constable. Francisco de Goya's late work demonstrates the Romantic interest in the irrational, while the work of Arnold Böcklin evokes mystery. In the United States the Romantic tradition of landscape painting was known as the Hudson River School. Important painters of that school include Thomas Cole, Frederick Church, Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, and John Frederick Kensett among others. Luminism was another important movement in American landscape painting related to the Hudson River School.
The leading Barbizon School painter Camille Corot painted sometimes as a romantic, sometimes as a Realist who looks ahead to Impressionism. A major force in the turn towards Realism at mid-century was Gustave Courbet. In the latter third of the century Impressionists like Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, and Edgar Degas and the slightly younger post-Impressionists like Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, and Paul Cezanne lead art up to the edge of modernism.
I like the classical/ traditional style of painting and subject matter. It appeals to me the most because I prefer and have been around it the most, having the house full of framed Botticelli re-prints. I recreated the oil on canvas painting in a gauche, semi-expressionistic style. This is because I mainly use oils and acrylic paints at home, so I decieded to try something different.
http://perso.orange.fr/verat/CABANEL.htm
http://www.artrenewal.org/asp/database/art.asp?aid=5
http://www.ocaiw.com/galleria_niah/index.php
http://www.oil-painting-techniques.com/history-of-oil-painting.html
