Portrait de Madame Edouard Hervé

Portrait de Madame Édouard Hervé, painted in 1884 and held in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris (Petit Palais), depicts the wife of Édouard Hervé, the journalist and founder of Le Soleil, a royalist newspaper of the Third Republic. The Hervé family belonged to the conservative Catholic literary and journalistic elite of Paris — a social world distinct from the aristocratic and American circles that provided most of Cabanel's other known portrait commissions. Cabanel's engagement with this milieu reflects the breadth of his Parisian connections by the mid-1880s, when his institutional position at the Beaux-Arts and his Salon prestige made him accessible to upper-middle-class patrons beyond the very wealthy. The Petit Palais's collection of Parisian portrait subjects gives this work a documentary dimension as a record of the republican bourgeois intellectual class of the early Third Republic.

Oil on canvas in Cabanel's late portrait manner, with the smooth academic face technique maintained but perhaps with a slightly looser freedom in the background and costume handling that characterizes his work of the 1880s. The palette for bourgeois female portraiture of this period tends toward formal blacks, relieved by white lace and warm flesh tones, creating the respectable elegance expected of a professional man's wife.