Alexandre Cabanel's Le Paradis Perdu, (Paradise Lost) is now in the collection of the Musée d'Orsay

ARTDAILY

Alexandre Cabanel's Le Paradis Perdu, (Paradise Lost) is now in the collection of the Musée d'Orsay.

CALIFORNIA---Gallery 19C, a Los Angeles based gallery specializing in 19th Century European Paintings, announced today the sale of "Paradise Lost", by Alexandre Cabanel, to the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. Intended for King Maximilian II of Bavaria as part of a larger tableau of thirty decorative historical canvases for his Foundation “for the gifted,” or Maximilianeum, Paradis Perdu was to be the artist’s most important and largest commission for an institution outside of France. Cabanel had already, by the 1860s, undertaken many mural schemes, complex iconographic programs, and decorative cycles in public buildings and private residences and his prowess as a religious painter, in the tradition of the great Italian Renaissance masters, had been noted by no less influential a figure than the critic Théophile Gautier. [link]