Echo, Alexandre Cabanel (c.1874)

Echo, Alexandre Cabanel (1874) Alexandre Cabanel’s Echo captures the tragic beauty of the nymph doomed to speak only the words of others. In Greek myth, Hera’s curse robs Echo of her voice, leaving her unable to express her love for Narcissus. Cabanel paints her in a moment of startled awareness, mouth open, hands raised to her ears as if hearing her own voice vanish into the air. Draped in the refined polish and idealized form championed by the French Académie des Beaux-Arts, the figure embodies 19th-century academic elegance—graceful, poised, and meticulously rendered. While critics of the era sometimes dismissed such idealized nudes as lacking realism, Cabanel’s Echo transforms restraint into allure. The painting blends mythic melancholy with the serene perfection of the academic style, offering a vision of beauty suspended between sound and silence, presence and loss.   Cotton and polyester canvas on Radiata pine wood frame sourced from renewable forests. Includes back mounting.