Birth of Venus

Art critic Philip Gilbert Hamerton admired Cabanel’s Birth of Venus when he saw it at the 1863 Salon:

“She lay in full light on a soft couch of clear sea-water that heaved under her with gleams of tender azure and pale emerald, wherein her long hair half mingled, as if it were a little rippling stream of golden water losing itself in the azure deep. The form was wildly voluptuous, the utmost extremities participating in a kind of rhythmical, musical motion. The soft, sleepy eyes just opened to the light were beaming with latent passion, and there was a half-childish, half-womanly waywardness in the playful tossing of the white arms. The whole figure was colored with a dazzling delicacy.”

Cited in Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Peversity. Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 106.

Similar Subjects by Other Artists

János Donát, Venus, 1810 (Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest)