Inventory

Provenance

Artist (and sold, Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, 22-25 May 1889, lot 35)

Marquis Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre (acquired at the above sale)

Saint-Yves d’Alveydre’s bequest to Gérard Encausse

Thence by descent to Philippe Encausse

Mr. Audouy (acquired from the above)

Gallery Elstir

Private collection, Paris, since 1995

Literature

Jean Nougaret, Alexandre Cabanel, Sa vie son œuvre, essai de catalogue, mémoire pour l’obtention du diplôme d’études supérieures d’histoire de l’art, Montpellier, faculté des lettres et sciences humaines, 1962 (unpublished), no. 167, p. 117

Jean Nougaret, “Catalogue sommaire de l’œuvre peint d’Alexandre Cabanel,” Alexandre Cabanel, 1823-1889, La tradition du beau, exh. cat. (eds Michel Hilaire, Sylvain Amic) Paris, Somogy, Montpellier, Musée Fabre, 2010, no. 187, p. 460

Catalogue note

Le Paradis Perdu was one of the three paintings that Cabanel exhibited at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1867. It had been commissioned in 1862 by King Ludwig II of Bavaria for the Maximilianeum, a didactic institution he had founded to educate the best and brightest of Munich’s elite. Tragically, the painting became a casualty of the Second World War; it was destroyed during the bombing of Munich in 1945. 

While Cabanel was already a successful painter in France, Le Paradis Perdu was his first major foreign commission.  The painting was monumental in scale, measuring 520 by 380 cm. (17 by 12 feet); fortunately, we know what it looked like based on Cabanel’s repetition, smaller in scale (Musée d’Orsay, acquired from Gallery 19C in 2017, fig. 1). Cabanel also executed numerous preparatory studies – small oil sketches, detailed pencil drawings and large-scale studies for the individual figures, especially for Adam and Eve. Our painting is one of his early interpretations for the figure of Adam. While the physicality of the male body has been repeated in the finished work, Cabanel dramatically altered Adam’s attitude and position. The outstretched arms in the study are replaced with a much more contorted pose in the final painting. It would be presumptuous to interpret the reasons for the change, but one may speculate. In the study, does Adam perhaps plead for forgiveness only to see Cabanel recast him as a man hiding from his shame, sin and humiliation before he is expelled from Paradise?