Pandora

Pandora, painted in 1873 and held at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, engages with the Hesiodic myth of the first woman, created by Hephaestus at Zeus's command to bring misfortune to humanity. The painting likely depicts Pandora with the notorious jar (later tradition transforming it to a box) that releases all evils into the world, retaining only Hope inside when it is closed. Cabanel's treatment of Pandora in 1873 places the work within a wave of Pandora subjects that occupied European academic and Symbolist-adjacent painting in the 1870s: Alma-Tadema, Waterhouse, and Odilon Redon all treated the myth in this period. The Walters Art Museum's holding reflects the active collecting by William T. and Henry Walters of French academic painting — the Walters collection was among the finest repositories of Salon painting assembled by American collectors in the nineteenth century.

Oil on canvas employing Cabanel's established nude or semi-nude female figure technique, here applied to a subject with darker mythological implications than the Birth of Venus. Pandora's relationship to the box or jar is the compositional fulcrum — whether she has just opened it or is contemplating doing so determines the temporal focus of the image. The palette may shift toward more dramatic contrasts than Cabanel's usual pastel mythologies.