Phèdre

By 1880 Alexandre Cabanel was the establishment made flesh, the Salon's favourite and the teacher everyone wanted. For this he reached back to an ancient story that Paris was watching live on stage, since Sarah Bernhardt had been electrifying audiences as Racine's Phaedra for years. Phaedra is the queen destroyed by a hopeless passion for her stepson Hippolytus. Cabanel shows her collapsed sideways across a bed after confessing it, one arm trailing over the edge, her two servants frozen in despair. Everything around her is heavy and expensive, oriental patterns worked into the furniture and the drapery, a fur thrown on the floor. He showed it at the Salon of 1880 and gave it that same year to Montpellier, the town where he was born.