Alexandre Cabanel painted Florentine Poet in 1861 for the Paris Salon. The version in the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a small oil on wood panel, about 30 by 50 cm, and the museum catalogues it as a reduced replica of the Salon picture, one of two reduced versions that entered American collections late in the nineteenth century. It came to the Met in 1923 through the bequest of John Hobart Warren.
A recital nobody is attending
The poet sits at the left on a long stone bench in a garden, dressed in a dark cloak and a red hood, one hand raised in mid-recitation. He is the only person in the picture who is talking, and he seems to be the only one who cares. In the middle of the bench a young couple look at their clasped hands rather than at him. A young man in a gold tunic beside them has tipped his head back and appears to be asleep. A fourth listener sprawls along the top of the bench wall, chin in hand, gazing off. It is a funny, affectionate scene about what happens to even a great poet when there is a pretty girl and a warm afternoon.
Little-known facts
- The title never names the poet. Cabanel gives the setting a medieval Florentine look and leaves the identity open, so viewers supply their own.
- The painter signed it at the lower right as Alex Cabanel.
- Cabanel became one of the most successful painters of the Second Empire. Two years later, his Birth of Venus (1863) was bought by Napoleon III.
- The Met panel is deliberately a smaller replica. Replicas like this were a normal way for a painter to share a successful Salon picture with collectors who could not buy the original.
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