Gustave Moreau
The dreamer of Symbolism.
Gustave Moreau painted mythological scenes covered in jewel-like detail. Matisse and Rouault were his pupils.
Gustave Moreau was born in Paris in 1826. His father was an architect who gave his son a thorough classical education. Moreau studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and was strongly influenced by the painter Théodore Chassériau, who combined Ingres's line with Delacroix's colour. From 1857 to 1859 he lived in Italy, where he copied the Renaissance masters and became friends with the young Edgar Degas.
His breakthrough came at the Salon of 1864 with Oedipus and the Sphinx, now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The picture shows the Sphinx clinging to the hero's chest in a desolate mountain ravine. Moreau became known for his images of mythological and biblical figures, especially dangerous and seductive women. Salome, who dances before King Herod to obtain the head of John the Baptist, became one of his favourite subjects. His watercolour The Apparition, in which the bleeding head floats in the air before her, is in the Musée d'Orsay.
Moreau's pictures are crowded with detail. Surfaces are covered with ornament, jewels and architecture that glitter like goldsmith's work. He combined thick layers of paint with fine lines and sometimes drew patterns directly on top of the paint. His world is dreamlike and mysterious, far from the everyday life of the Realists. He became a leading figure of Symbolism, and the writer Joris-Karl Huysmans celebrated his Salome in the novel Against Nature.
Moreau was reclusive and never married. For many years he had a close relationship with Alexandrine Dureux. From 1891 he was a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts. There he was an unusually open-minded teacher who encouraged his students to find their own way. Among them were Henri Matisse and Georges Rouault.
Moreau died in 1898. He bequeathed his house and thousands of paintings, watercolours and drawings to the French state. The Musée Gustave Moreau in Paris opened in 1903 with Rouault as its first curator. The Surrealists, especially André Breton, later admired his dream world.