Born in Montpellier, France, 1823, Alexandre Cabanel was probably best known as a teacher of the academic arts.

From a family without the means to send their son to art school, at the age of seventeen, he was awarded a grant to train in Paris at the School of Ecole des Beaux-Arts under François-Edouard Picot. His first exhibition was at the Paris Salon in 1844 and he won the Prix de Rome scholarship in 1845 at the age of twenty two, enabling him to attend lessons in Rome studying the classical academic themes.

By the time Cabanel exhibited his most famous work, The Birth of Venus, in 1862, he had achieved widespread fame, including many awards, and important commissions including works for Napoleon and Ludwig II, the King of Bavaria. In 1863 he was elected a member of the Institute and in the same year, appointed professor at the École des Beaux-Arts.

Cabanel was a painter of historical and religious subjects in the academic style but he was also well-known as a portrait painter. He was elected regularly to the Salon jury and had pupils by the hundreds entering at the Salon. He was a rival of William Bouguereau in his depictions of nudes and a staunch opponent of the Impressionists. This attitude may have made him popular in his lifetime, but it was the wrong combination for the generations of artists to come later, especially the Impressionists, who were conforming to the strict academic disciplines of Cabanel.

After his death in 1889, his reputation collapsed and little was known of his work for many years to come but through his students, Cabanel did more than any other artist of his generation to form the character of the "la belle époque" in French painting.