Alexandre Cabanel | Adam, study for Paradise Lost, 1867

French🎨 Academic and Classical painter Alexandre Cabanel (1823-1889) was born in the city of Montpellier. He showed a proclivity for drawing at a young age, and was enrolled at the local art school in his hometown of Montpellier at the age of ten.

By 17, he was given the opportunity to study at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris.

In 1844, he exhibited for the first time at the Paris Salon, and was awarded the Prix de Rome in 1845.

Following his debut, he soon became a favorite of the Paris Salon.

Alexandre Cabanel | Samson and Delilah, 1878

Delilah, also spelled Dalila, in the Old Testament, the central figure of Samson’s last love story (Judges 16).

She was a Philistine who, bribed to entrap Samson, coaxed him into revealing that the secret of his strength was his long hair, whereupon she took advantage of his confidence to betray him to his enemies. Her name has since become synonymous with a voluptuous, treacherous woman.

Alexandre Cabanel | Ophelia, 1883

Christie's | Remaining faithful to historical and literary subjects as themes for his paintings, this work depicts perhaps the most complex and vivid of characters immortalised in Shakespeare's Hamlet, Ophelia.

Such a captivating character, she has held the fascination of artists for centuries, widely portrayed by Victorian masters in particular, such as Sir Thomas Francis Dicksee, John Everett Millais and John William Waterhouse among others.

Paul Gauguin | Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin, 1889

Paul Gauguin | Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin, 1889 | National Gallery in Prague

Gustave Courbet, the perhaps most famous exponent of Realism in French painting, created a number of sensational paintings.

Standing out among them is the work “The Meeting or Bonjour Monsieur Courbet” of 1854, in which Courbet shows himself out wandering, whereby he encounters his patron Alfred Bruyas and his servant. Bruyas supported Courbet and purchased the large-format painting.

When it was exhibited at the Paris World Exhibition of 1855, the audacity of the painter, who presented himself with abundant self-confidence and in a much more favourable light than his patron, was not lost on spectators.

Paul Gauguin | Washerwomen, 1888 | MoMA

Paul Gauguin | Washerwomen, 1888 | MoMA

In October 1888, Gauguin arrived in Arles where his friend Vincent Van Gogh had invited him to come and work.

The two artists had been writing to each other for several months, recording progress on their attempts to produce a non-naturalist landscape.

Paul Gauguin | Young Man with a Flower behind his Ear, 1891

Originally in the collection of the great modern master Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin's striking and evocative portrait of a young man, clad in a pink European blouse and loose cravat, with the native adornment of a small white tiaré blossom tucked over his left ear, is among the first paintings the artist completed after arriving in Tahiti in 1891.

The forthright charm of this painting stems from Gauguin's sensitive characterization of his sitter, a handsome and thoughtful man of whom the artist was clearly quite fond.

Paul Gauguin | Petit Breton à l'Oie, 1889

This important depiction of the Breton countryside is one of the pictures that Gauguin completed in 1889, when he was working in Pont Aven.

Executed with lush colors and linear undulations that presage his pictures of the tropics, this composition presents an exoticized depiction of the region, interpreted through the stylization of Gauguin’s late Symbolist aesthetic.

The romanticizing of the natural world in this picture is indicative of Gauguin's desire to escape the trappings of industrialized France in the months prior to his departure for the South Pacific. | © Sotheby's