Echo

Echo, painted in 1874 and held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, depicts the Ovidian nymph who fell in love with Narcissus and, rejected, wasted away until only her voice remained. Ovid's Metamorphoses was a central sourcebook for French academic mythology throughout the nineteenth century, and the Echo and Narcissus myth offered painters the rare opportunity to depict melancholy and longing rather than action or celebration. Cabanel's treatment in 1874 came a decade after his celebrated Birth of Venus and at a moment when his reputation as the preeminent painter of female mythological subjects was secure. The Metropolitan Museum's acquisition of the work testifies to the active American collecting of French academic painting in the 1870s and 1880s, when the Met was aggressively building its collection and French Salon paintings were considered the global standard of contemporary artistic achievement.

Oil on canvas emphasizing the melancholic atmosphere appropriate to the subject. The nymph's figure is likely shown in a landscape setting — rocky grotto or forest pool — with her posture conveying the inward suffering of unrequited love. Cabanel's smooth flesh-tone technique provides the physical beauty that makes the character's suffering poignant, while the surrounding nature is handled more atmospherically.