Le Paradis perdu

Le Paradis perdu (Paradise Lost), painted in 1867 and held in the Musée d'Orsay, is Cabanel's ambitious engagement with Milton's epic as filtered through the long tradition of the Expulsion from Eden in European religious painting. Milton's Paradise Lost had attracted French academic painters throughout the Romantic period — Flaxman, Fuseli, and later Martin had established iconic visual interpretations in northern Europe, while French painters responded with their own academically inflected treatments. Cabanel's 1867 version of the subject — depicting Adam and Eve at the moment of expulsion or in the fallen state following their sin — allowed him to return to the nude figure in a context legitimized by religious and literary authority rather than mythology alone. The Musée d'Orsay's holding places the work in dialogue with other monumental nineteenth-century religious and literary paintings in the French national collections.

Oil on canvas of likely large format, demanding the complex figure composition required for monumental religious history painting. The nude or partially clad figures of Adam and Eve are rendered with academic precision, while the surrounding landscape or celestial elements must convey both the beauty of Eden and the desolation of its loss. Cabanel's smooth flesh technique is here deployed in service of emotional drama rather than erotic pleasure.