Millais’ wonderful painting of Ophelia wasn’t the first such work. From West and Delacroix to Rossetti and Bastien-Lepage, here she is.
Cabanel
Four years of landscapes, becoming increasingly painterly. Early views of major Impressionist themes around Paris and the coast at Étretat, over a decade before Monet.
The Second Circle of Hell, in which those whose sin was lust are blown by eternal storms. The story of Paolo and Francesca, and many wonderful paintings.
The very large Paris Salon of 1883 introduced the public and critics to a new and growing movement in painting. It wasn’t Impressionism or Post-Impressionism, though.
Eight of Cabanel’s most precocious and brilliant pupils. Only one won the Prix de Rome, and the others went on to develop Naturalist art. Was Cabanel the father of this new movement?
A precocious painter who was a favourite of Napoleon III, he taught at the École des Beaux-Arts for 25 years. Many of his students became Naturalists. Coincidence? Here’s his story and work.
Behind his traditional narrative paintings are his views on the Third Republic, the slaughter of the Paris communards in 1871, and the Dreyfus affair.
This story remained almost unknown and unpainted until it suddenly became popular after 1850. Paintings by Etty, Rossetti, Cabanel and others.
Trained in the same studio as Bastien-Lepage and Gervex, he emerged a bitter critic of academic painting. He painted several masterpieces of Naturalism.
A story which has been told by a long succession of literary and musical works. But this painting is almost the only one to depict it visually.
