ALEXANDRE CABANEL (1823-1889) - Receive artist alerts » - More items from this artist »

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Black and Red Chalk on paper.

Sign: Alex Cabanel

19.00cm wide    28.00cm high    (7.48 inches wide  11.02 inches high)

USA Art Market.

Related Readings: “Le Musee du Luxembourg en 1874”, Exh. Grand Palais, Paris (1974), fig. 40; F. Mace de Lepinay, Peintures et Sculptures du Pantheon, Paris (1997), p.21.

The son of a respected shopkeeper in Montpellier, Alexandre Cabanel was born a gifted ‘painter’. At the age of 11 years old, he entered the ‘School of Drawing’ and by the age of 13 he was able to instruct his friends. By 1839, the precocious young artist won a grant to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris where he studied under Francois Edouard Picot (1786-1868). In 1845 the painter won the Prix de Rome thus enabling him to study in Italy for five years and it is the very strong impact of Renaissance artists which is particularly striking in the present drawing of ‘Head of a Man’. On his return to Paris he received important commissions for decoration at the Hotel de Ville in Montpellier and at the Louvre in Paris. Like Ingres (1780-1867), Cabanel created History and Religious painting, Study of Nude in Mythology and subjects of Middle Ages and Renaissance, all dear to ‘Romantics’.

In 1855, the painter exhibited a number of paintings at the Salon, including the Glorification of St Louis, thus establishing his academic and official credentials. The present drawing is preparatory for a figure in that painting, which was commissioned by the state on February 12th 1853 for the St Louis Chapel at the Chateau de Vincennes. The painting, finished before May 1st 1855, is now in Luneville (Musee) and that same year the artist received the Legion d’Honneur followed by his election to the Institut in 1863 and nomination as professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Cabanel won the Grande Medaille d’Honneur at the Salons of 1865, 1867 and 1878. By the 1860’s, his reputation for portraits was universal, rivalling Franz Xavier Winterhalter as portrait painter to the Napoleonic aristocracy. He was regularly elected to the Salon jury and his pupils could be counted by the hundreds at the Salons. Certainly Cabanel did more than any other artist of his generation to form the character of ‘belle epoque’ French painting.

The present sheet may well be a portrait even though the draughtsman incorporates it into a historical subject demonstrating that portrait tradition could be merged with genre painting. The high degree of academic virtuosity, the research of expression based on study after nature as well as the suggestion of strong feeling, are all very explicit in Head of a Man. Here too, the delicate line, the modelling of image in rendering chiaroscuro as well as his almost sculptural approach also pays homage to his respect for the French school of Sculpture. A Head very similar to our drawing can also be connected to a painted figure in “La vie de Saint Louis”, one of four painted panels on the life of St Louis in the Pantheon. Much of Cabanel’s oeuvre can be found in the musee Fabre in Montpellier, his birthplace.