An angel named by an hour

Most titles in this catalogue name an angel by rank, by office, or by the scene he interrupts. This one names him by a time of day. The Evening Angel assigns neither an order of the celestial hierarchy nor a task: no announcement, no rescue, no weighing, no guard. Evening is a setting, and the figure takes its identity from it. That is a nineteenth-century habit rather than a devotional one, and the record shows it in the filing.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1848 and gives Alexandre Cabanel, a French painter, with Academicism as the style term. The recorded dimensions are 19 x 23 cm. The measured colour family is yellow. The location on record is Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France.

Where the record files it

The catalogue's subject tags for this entry are Cultural Heritage, Mythology and Fantasy. There is no religious tag on it at all. An angel filed under mythology has been moved out of a system of ranks and into a repertoire of motifs, which is roughly what happened to the figure in academic painting: the wings survive, the office does not. This is one of two entries in the catalogue held at the Musée Fabre, and one of three by this painter.