Cabanel showed his first work at the Salon at the age of twenty in 1843 and had been a favourite there ever since. Trained under François Picot at the École des Beaux-Arts, he won the Prix de Rome in 1845 and studied in Italy before returning to Paris for prestigious commissions, including work in the Hôtel de Ville ^[1]. Two years before The Birth of Venus he had already stirred controversy with Nymph Abducted by a Faun, a mythological fantasy showing a white-skinned female nude caught in the grip of a leering faun, a painting that established the kind of subject matter for which he became known ^[1].

The 1863 Salon at the Palais des Champs-Élysées held so many painted depictions of Venus that the critic Théophile Gautier gave the exhibition a nickname, the Salon des Vénus ^[1]. This was also the Salon that rejected Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe, a rejection controversial enough that Napoleon III authorised a separate Salon des Refusés for spurned works that same year ^[3]. Against that background, Cabanel's picture stood out as the safe, officially sanctioned version of the nude: idealised, mythological, and finished with the smooth, academic surface the Salon jury rewarded, in deliberate contrast to the harsher, more contemporary nudity that Manet and Courbet were pushing at the Salon's edges in these same years ^[3].

Napoleon III bought The Birth of Venus for his own collection, a decision that turned an already popular exhibit into the single most talked-about painting of the Salon. The historian Ross King argues that the Emperor's appreciation had less to do with any claim to classical idealism than with the picture's directly sensual appeal, and that this reading of the purchase only sharpened the controversy already surrounding the painting's frank celebration of the female nude ^[2]. The purchase, and the publicity it generated, made Cabanel one of the most famous names in French art by the mid-1860s ^[2].