Phaedra

Phaedra, painted in 1880 and held by the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, represents Cabanel's engagement with the tragic heroines of Greek mythology and their literary reinterpretation through French classical drama. Phaedra — the Cretan princess who falls in love with her stepson Hippolytus, is rejected, and destroys him through a false accusation — had been treated definitively for French culture by Racine's 1677 tragedy, and Cabanel's image draws on that tradition as much as on the original myth. The subject allowed Cabanel to depict a female figure in extreme psychological distress, moving the mythological genre toward the territory of psychological portraiture. The Musée Fabre's concentration of Cabanel's work in his home city makes it the most important single institutional context for understanding his development, and Phaedra alongside Vénus victorieuse demonstrates the range within his mythological production.

Oil on canvas combining Cabanel's refined academic figure technique with an expressiveness in the face and posture that distinguishes psychological subjects from his more placid Venus compositions. The flesh tones carry a pale, feverish quality appropriate to the character's tormented state. Costume and setting echo Greco-Roman convention while the emotional intensity reaches toward Romantic drama.