Gustave Moreau

gigatos | January 13, 2022

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Summary

Gustave Moreau was born on April 6, 1826 in Paris and died in the same city on April 18, 1898. He was a French painter, engraver, drawer and sculptor.

Encouraged by his architect father, he received a classical education and was introduced to the graphic arts from childhood. His formative years were marked by the teachings of François-Édouard Picot and his encounter with the style of Théodore Chassériau, who pushed him towards a non-academic approach to history painting. In 1852, he exhibited for the first time at the Salon and moved to the New Athens district. The death of Chassériau pushed him to question his art and to make a second trip to Italy in the company of Alexandre-Frédéric Charlot de Courcy and Edgar Degas, after a first one at the age of 15. He learned to copy the Renaissance masters in several Italian cities, imitating Michelangelo fervently in Rome, but hardly produced any original works. In the late 1850s, he embarked on monumental projects that he left unfinished and began an affair with Alexandrine Dureux. His career really began with Oedipus and the Sphinx, exhibited in 1864, as well as the 1865 and 1869 Salons. He gradually emerged as a renovator of the tradition thanks to his unrealistic approach to mythological subjects. His activity diminished in the 1870s, although he developed an activity as a watercolorist. He received an official consecration by receiving the Legion of Honor. His taste for sculpture, nourished by his second Italian trip, inspired him essentially for his painted work.

He is one of the main representatives in painting of the symbolist movement, impregnated with mysticism. His style is characterized by his taste for ornamental detail, impregnated with antique and exotic motifs.

Most of his works are kept in the Gustave-Moreau Museum in Paris.

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Childhood

Gustave Moreau was born on April 6, 1826 in Paris, at 7, rue des Saints-Pères. He was the son of Louis Moreau, architect of the City of Paris (1790-1862) and Pauline Desmoutiers (1802-1884), daughter of the mayor of Douai in 1795-1797 and 1815. Through his mother, he was related to powerful landowning families established in Flanders, the Brasmes, the Le Francois, the des Rotours. The Moreau family moved to Vesoul in 1827, Louis Moreau being then architect of the department of Haute-Saône. In 1830, the Moreau family returned to Paris, to 48, rue Saint-Nicolas d”Antin, then to 16, rue des Trois-Frères.

Young Gustave, who was in poor health, started drawing at the age of six, encouraged by his father who instilled in him a classical culture. He entered the Rollin College in 1837 where he stayed for two years and won a drawing prize on August 20, 1839. His sister Camille (born in 1827) died in 1840. All the hopes of the Moreau parents were then focused on their only son who continued his studies at home.

Louis Moreau studied at the École des Beaux-Arts from 1810, he was a student of Charles Percier. He was an admirer of Roman architecture as well as the Encyclopedists of the 18th century. The architectural achievements of which he is the author are of the purest neo-classical taste. Noting the lack of intellectual training of the artists of his time, he was keen to give his son a thorough education, particularly in the humanities. This was achieved through a rich family library in which one finds all the classics such as Ovid, Dante or Winckelmann. In spite of his pronounced taste for neo-classicism, Louis Moreau never imposed any of his ideas on his son, he left him free to choose.

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Education and training

In 1841, the young Gustave, then 15 years old, made his first trip to Italy with his mother, his aunt and his uncle. Before his departure, his father gave him a sketchbook that he filled with landscapes and views of peasants sketched on the spot, which is kept in the Gustave-Moreau Museum.

After obtaining his baccalaureate, Gustave Moreau is authorized by his father to train as a painter. Louis Moreau had submitted a painting of his son (Phryne before her judges) to Pierre-Joseph Dedreux-Dorcy and it was the latter”s favorable opinion that decided Louis Moreau to allow his son to study painting. In 1844, he became a student of the neo-classical painter François-Édouard Picot. Picot”s teaching was preparatory to the entrance exam to the École des Beaux-Arts, and consisted of working from live models in the morning and copying works from the Louvre in the afternoon. Thanks to these lessons, he entered the Beaux-Arts in 1846. But, tired of his two successive failures at the Prix de Rome, he left this institution in 1849.

After leaving the Beaux-Arts, Gustave Moreau was brought by his father to the paintings of the Cour des Comptes. In this building, Chassériau painted the main staircase from 1844 to 1848. These paintings aroused the enthusiasm of Gustave Moreau who said to his father “I dream of creating an epic art that is not a school art”. It is from this period that Gustave Moreau launches into ambitious compositions of history painting that he often reworks without completing them. Among these large unfinished compositions is The Daughters of Thespius, begun in 1853, enlarged in 1882 but still “in progress”. This painting bears the trace of Chassériau”s influence, especially for the central part which is inspired by the Tepidarium presented the same year (1853). Gustave Moreau befriended Chassériau in 1850 and took a studio in the same street as him. He saw him as a true mentor and even modelled his life on his own, becoming an elegant young man who frequented the salons of the New Athens and attended opera performances. It is very likely that Chassériau helped Moreau to perfect his drawing skills, especially in the field of portraits. Most of the portraits drawn by Moreau date from the years 1852-1853 and Moreau had drawings that Chassériau had given him.

Lost after his years of study, of which he found the teaching insufficient, Gustave Moreau went to the home of Eugène Delacroix to ask for his help. Delacroix could not take on a new student in his studio. However, he understood his dismay and told him “What do you want them to teach you, they know nothing”. The influence of Delacroix was decisive for the young painter”s work and can be seen from his first painting at the Salon of 1852. We also know that Delacroix appreciated Gustave Moreau.

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The beginning as an artist

Since 1848, Moreau has been working on a Pietà with Delacroix”s Pietà of Saint-Denys-du-Saint-Sacrement as his source of inspiration. Moreau”s Pietà was bought in 1851 by the State thanks to his father”s connections but for the modest sum of 600 francs, the equivalent of the price of a copy. He exhibited it in 1852 at the Salon where it went unnoticed, except for Théophile Gautier who was astonished to see a painting so close to Delacroix by a pupil of Picot. The same year, his parents bought him a house-studio – which became the Gustave-Moreau Museum – in the heart of New Athens where the whole Moreau family settled. He presented Darius after the Battle of Arbelles and The Song of Songs at the 1853 Salon, both strongly inspired by Théodore Chassériau. Around 1854, he painted the Scottish Rider, a painting full of romantic ardor that he did not present to any public, it is part of those works that he intended only for himself. He painted religious subjects or those taken from Antiquity and mythology, such as Moses, in view of the Promised Land, takes off his sandals (1854), or The Athenians delivered to the Minotaur in the labyrinth of Crete (commissioned by the State), which was exhibited at the Universal Exhibition of 1855, without success, and then sent to Bourg-en-Bresse.

The death of Chassériau in 1856 was a real turning point for Gustave Moreau and his art. That year, he undertook The Young Man and Death as a tribute to his friend Chassériau. Noting the limits of his art and struggling to finish the painting Hercules and Omphale commissioned by Benoît Fould, he decided to return to Italy. To finance this Grand Tour, his father Louis Moreau rents out the various floors of the house-studio, including Gustave”s studio, which is then occupied by his friend Eugène Fromentin in his absence. His departure is rather hasty because of a sentimental affair, which means that he leaves without his mother or his friend Narcisse Berchère.

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Second trip to Italy

In September 1857, Gustave Moreau began his Italian journey with Alexandre-Frédéric Charlot de Courcy (Rome, Florence, Milan, Pisa, Siena, Naples, Venice).

Gustave Moreau arrived in Rome on October 22, 1857. He settled near the Villa Medici and enrolled in evening classes at the villa where he studied live models. This brought him into contact with residents such as Élie Delaunay and Henri Chapu as well as Léon Bonnat and Edgar Degas. His vast culture and talent earned him the admiration of his fellow students who made him a mentor. Gustave Moreau was also close to the Villa Farnesina, the Academy of Saint Luke and the Sistine Chapel, and he spent his days working hard as a copyist. He was primarily interested in the great masters of the 16th century and their immediate successors (Michelangelo, Raphael, Correggio, Sodoma and Peruzzi). His approach is not a simple visual study. By copying the works of the painters he admired, he intended to experimentally penetrate their way of painting. His first work was a copy of a fragment of the fresco of the Wedding of Alexander and Roxane in the Sodoma in the Villa Farnesina, from which he retained the “matte tone and soft appearance of the fresco”. But Gustave Moreau was a fervent admirer of Michelangelo, so he went to the Sistine Chapel where he copied Michelangelo”s frescoes for two months, retaining “the wonderfully learned and harmonious coloring of these pendants”. He then went to the Academy of Saint Luke and copied Raphael”s Putto which he described as “the most beautiful piece of painting”. This exclusive interest in the art of the Italian Renaissance provoked a call to order from his father – who was passionate about ancient Rome – who ordered him to take an interest in ancient art. He studied the proportions of ancient statues with Chapu.

Gustave Moreau returned to Rome from April to July 1859. The political unrest linked to the Italian war of 1859 worried Gustave Moreau who was not sure he could go to Naples. During this second stay, he made a copy of The Death of Germanicus by Nicolas Poussin in the Barberini Palace, with the aim of getting as close as possible to the original, even down to the dimensions of the painting.

Gustave Moreau arrived in Florence on June 9, 1858 and met again with Élie Delaunay. He made studies after works in the Uffizi, the Pitti Palace and Santa Maria Novella. At the Uffizi, Moreau fell in love with a copy of The Battle of Cadore, which he mistook for an original sketch by Titian. The original work was destroyed in the fire of the Doge”s Palace in 1577. To help him in his copying work, the painting was taken down and put on an easel, within his reach. Moreau also made a copy of Verrochio”s Baptism of Christ, but reproduced only the angel. In fact, according to Vasari, this angel was painted by Leonardo da Vinci at a time when he was outstripping his master. In August, he was joined by Degas and together they visited churches to study Andrea del Sarto, Pontormo, Bronzino and Bellini.

In December 1858, Gustave Moreau made a second stay in Florence with his family. Degas, who had been waiting for him since his previous stay, insisted on making him discover Botticelli. On this occasion, Moreau made a copy of The Birth of Venus. This copy of the whole painting already shows a dissociation between line and color that he will use in his later works. Moreau also made a copy of the Equestrian Portrait of Charles V by Antoon Van Dyck and another of the Equestrian Portrait of Philip IV of Spain by Velázquez. Here again, although he was in Florence, Moreau did not show more interest in Florentine painters.

Gustave Moreau reunited with his parents in August 1858 in Lugano and the family headed for Milan. During the stay in Milan, his father, who is passionate about Palladio, forces him to take an interest in architecture.

On September 18, 1858, the Moreau family arrives in Venice. Gustave Moreau takes advantage of this opportunity to study Carpaccio, who can only be studied in this city. He had probably learned about this painter from a letter that Degas had sent him on the advice of a visiting art lover. He therefore undertook to copy Carpaccio”s works such as The Legend of Saint Ursula or Saint George Slaying the Dragon, which he reproduced life-size.

Moreau and Degas spend a short stay in Pisa and Siena during which Moreau makes some sketches and watercolors after the frescoes of the Camposanto in Pisa. In particular, he made a few watercolor copies of the Triumph of Death at the Camposanto.

Moreau finally managed to reach Naples on July 13, 1859 and spent two months at the Borbonico Museum. There, he finally became interested in ancient art and made a very prolific work of copying frescoes from Pompeii and Herculaneum. Here he found his favorite subject: history painting with a mythological theme. Among his copies are The Departure of Briseis, Achilles and the Centaur Chiron and Jupiter crowned with victory. In August, he met up with his friends Bonnat and Chapu again and undertook with them an ascent of Vesuvius.

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Waiting for the triumph

Gustave Moreau did not produce any original works during his stay in Italy, except for Hesiod and the Muse, which he produced during his first stay in Rome, and an Apollo and Marsyas, which remained very close to the models he had seen in museums. On his return from Italy, he remained fixed on his ambition to become a history painter by making an “epic art that is not a school art” and therefore devoted himself to monumental projects that he did not finish, such as the Daughters of Thespius (mentioned above) begun in 1853, but also The Pretenders (begun after 1858), The Magi and Tyrteus Singing in Battle, both begun in 1860. Gustave Moreau”s unfinished compositions are recorded as early as 1860 in a notebook offered by his friend Alexandre Destouches. In fact, from the first page, he lists 60 “Antique or Biblical compositions” in which we find the works begun before the Italian stay as well as others to come. The reason for his slowness in carrying out these unfinished and frequently interrupted projects is explained by his concern to make works that are extremely well documented. In addition, he always wanted to enrich his works with new meanings and even went so far as to include in his notes details that could not be represented by paint, such as smells or sounds. Thus, in his note on the Daughters of Thespius, he indicates “In the distance, fragrant gardens, powerful scents of orange trees, lemon trees, myrtle trees, spread and intoxicate”. As all this research did not lead to anything truly finished, Gustave Moreau did not exhibit any work before 1864. His father, who was a little impatient, wrote to him: “Of course I don”t mean, and you are quite sure of this, that you should suspend the studies you are doing with such a conscience; but in a year”s time, when they are finished, give us one of those works that suddenly bring their author to the top. Shouldn”t your good father finally enjoy the triumph he is counting on and waiting for!

Between 1859 and 1860, Gustave Moreau met Alexandrine Dureux, a schoolteacher who lived near Gustave Moreau”s house. His affair with Alexandrine Dureux was very discreet and although they were very intimate, she remained his “best and only friend”. Indeed, Moreau did not wish to start a family, stating that “marriage extinguishes the artist”, in accordance with a widespread opinion at the time in the artistic and literary world. He drew her portrait several times, gave her drawing lessons, and designed a dozen paintings, watercolors and fans for her, which are now kept in the Gustave-Moreau Museum. The fan La Péri was part of Alexandrine Dureux”s personal collection.

On February 17, 1862, Louis Moreau died. He did not know the “triumph on which he counts and which he waits”. This triumph, however, is in preparation, it is Oedipus and the Sphinx. Gustave Moreau had been working on this work since 1860, but his concern for perfection lengthened the time needed to complete the painting. In October 1862, he confided to his friend Fromentin: “I have taken an execution size cardboard, completed as much as possible from life and, for the millionth time in my life, I promise myself (but be sure that it will not be) not to start until everything, down to the smallest blade of grass, is definitively stopped.

In 1862, Gustave Moreau was commissioned by one of his friends, the painter Eugène Fromentin, to paint a Way of the Cross for the church of Notre-Dame de Decazeville. He accepted the commission without much enthusiasm because it was a job that left little room for the artist”s creativity. It is indeed a type of commission that is usually entrusted to artists and workshops specializing in church furniture. Léon Perrault, a painter specialized in religious painting and a pupil of Picot, like him, made a Way of the Cross for the church of Sainte-Radegonde in Poitiers in 1862. It is reproduced as is in several churches, which shows that originality is not required. Moreau realized his different stations from June 1862 to February 1863 in the most perfect anonymity and refused to sign his paintings in order not to be confused with the painters of religious subjects. He dreamed of being a history painter and waited for the Salon of 1864 to sign his name to a work that would bring him this notoriety. The paintings were executed very quickly, between three and four days for each canvas. These stations are marked by a strong sobriety, which contrasts with Gustave Moreau”s usual tendency to multiply the details. The Way of the Cross marks an important stage in Moreau”s work, as it is the first work he completed since his trip to Italy. Moreover, it is a forerunner of his Oedipus and the Sphinx, since on station 6, Veronica has the same attitude as the Sphinx and Christ, the same attitude as Oedipus. Until the 1960s the paintings – since they are not signed – were for a long time attributed to one of his pupils.

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The exhibition years

The period from 1864 to 1869 marks the real beginning of Gustave Moreau”s career. His previous unsuccessful attempts at the Salons were all but forgotten and it was now the history painter who was acclaimed. The paintings he produced during this period have the medium but very elongated format that characterizes them. To find this proportion, Moreau had measured with his cane the Madonna of the Rocks by Leonardo da Vinci.

In 1864, Moreau gained notoriety when he exhibited his painting Oedipus and the Sphinx at the Salon, which was bought for 8,000 francs by Prince Jerome Napoleon. With Oedipus and the Sphinx, Moreau intended to give a new lease of life to history painting. Indeed, the painting that attracts admiration and criticism at the 1863 Salon is Cabanel”s Birth of Venus. But at the Salon des Refusés it was Manet who triumphed with his Déjeuner sur l”herbe and attracted the young naturalist painters to him. The Salon of 1864 showed that the announced death of history painting was premature and Cham enjoyed showing Moreau”s Sphinx preventing Courbet from sleeping. The work, hailed by the critics, was described as “a thunderclap that burst in the middle of the Palace of Industry”. The critic notes the resemblance with the Oedipus explains the enigma of the sphinx of Ingres and for good reason, Moreau knew the painting of Ingres and was inspired for the appearance of his sphinx. However, Moreau differs from Ingres” work by the unrealistic way in which the sphinx clings to Oedipus. Indeed, there is something moral in this work that attracts the attention of the critics, which makes Théophile Gautier say that it is a “Greek Hamlet”. Gustave Moreau gives the message of the work in this quote:

“Traveler in the severe and mysterious hour of life, the man meets the eternal enigma which presses him and bruises him. But the strong soul defies the intoxicating and brutal reaches of matter and, with his eye fixed on the ideal, he walks confidently towards his goal after having trampled it underfoot.”

At the 1865 Salon, Manet created a scandal again, this time with his Olympia, whose nudity, because it was not related to history painting, shocked. Moreau presented two paintings at this Salon: Jason and The Young Man and Death, of a meticulous workmanship close to the Oedipus of the previous year. But these paintings are no longer surprising after the Oedipus and are therefore less successful. Worse still, this attention to detail provoked the mockery of certain critics who ironically described him as the “Benvenuto Cellini of painting”.

The subject of the painting is taken from Ovid”s Metamorphoses, of which Moreau owned a French edition of 1660, in which Medea is shown holding the enchanting potion and the hand she places on Jason”s shoulder is inspired by the fresco fragment Noces d”Alexandre et de Roxane, which Moreau had copied at the Villa Farnesina during his stay in Rome. As for Jason, he is the symbol of youth in Moreau”s work and is found in later paintings. While we know that Moreau was familiar with Delacroix”s Medea, he chooses to show here a peaceful and victorious couple. However, although Jason is indeed in the foreground, it is Medea who dominates, with her head placed higher and her mysterious and worrying look. The critics have reservations and Maxime Du Camp advises him to avoid “this kind of cute and graceful goldsmithery which is more ornamentation than painting”.

The Young Man and Death is a tribute to Chassériau. Chassériau is depicted with youthful features and his idealized body is inspired by the copy of a flayed body seen in the Borbonico Museum. The work was begun in 1856, after the artist”s death, and Gautier recognizes in this painting Chassériau”s youthful, albeit idealized, face. As for death, it is personified in the guise of Atropos, floating, with an hourglass and a sword that will inexorably cut the thread of life.

In spite of this somewhat critical reception, Moreau”s success as a renovator of the classical tradition is no less real. Thus, he was invited to the castle of Compiègne by the emperor and empress for a week from November 14, 1865. The painter said he was both flattered and very annoyed, which is why he asked his friend Fromentin, who had been invited a year earlier, for advice.

At the 1866 Salon, Moreau presented Young Thracian Girl with Orpheus” head and Diomedes devoured by his horses. The latter painting shocked the visitors by its cruelty and was quite different from Moreau”s work, who was known to prefer the man dreaming to the man acting. As for the other painting, Young Thracian Girl with Orpheus” Head, it met with a certain success since it was bought by the State at the end of the Salon and hung the following year in the Musée du Luxembourg. On this oil on wood, we see a young girl collecting the head of Orpheus on a lyre, “like that of Saint John the Baptist on a silver plate in the hands of Herodias” says Theophile Gautier. The specificity of this painting compared to the history painting that was in use until then, is that the episode represented does not exist. It is Moreau himself who invented this episode. This work is therefore the first manifestation of his symbolism, even before the concept was defined by the Moréas manifesto; the artist dives into himself to find the visions to represent in his works.

The 1869 Salon is a formidable paradox. The works presented there, Prometheus and Jupiter and Europa, are very well finished and have been conceived in view of their exhibition at the Salon. The jury was very favorable and awarded Moreau his third consecutive medal, which prevented him from getting more. Of Jupiter and Europa, Gautier, enthusiastic, rightly remarks that the Jupiter is inspired by the Assyrian androcephalous bulls; and of Prometheus, he detects an analogy between his sacrifice and that of Christ.

All the criticism is therefore not negative, but all the same, the works presented by Moreau at this 1869 Salon, as at the 1866 Salon, are strongly criticized and caricatured. Cham, who used to laugh at Courbet with Moreau”s Sphinx, now laughs at Moreau”s Orpheus with these words: “It is not only Orpheus who has lost his head, and so has this poor Moreau! Let us hope that it will be found for him too “. Touching his Jupiter and Europa, the amateurs were shocked by the dewlap of the bull which they judged disproportionate and Bertall caricatured the two sendings of the Salon of 1869. Faced with these criticisms, he stopped exhibiting until 1876. In addition, during these two Salons, other names made their mark on visitors: Courbet with The Shedding of Deer and Woman with a Parrot, Manet with The Balcony and Lunch in the Studio, Renoir with In Summer or The Plague in Rome by his friend Delaunay. Moreau at this time – apart from Orpheus – was more of an illustrator than a myth-maker.

Although he had deserted the Salons, Moreau did not desert his city or his country, he decided to stay in a besieged and increasingly hungry Paris. He joined the National Guard in August 1870 and defended the city until a rheumatic attack prevented him from using his left shoulder and arm in November. During this year of 1870, he planned to make a half-painted, half-sculpted monument “to the memory of our sublime vanquished and to the heroic campaign of 1870”. But once the exaltation passed, he abandoned the project. He did not have a good memory of the Paris Commune either, which led to the burning of the Cour des Comptes, a place whose paintings by Chassériau had excited him twenty years earlier.

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Triumph of symbolism

The painter”s inspiration seems to have dried up after these Parisian troubles. He painted little and even refused opportunities. Because of his aversion to the Prussian contracted at the time of the siege of Paris, he refused to participate in the 1873 World”s Fair in Vienna, not wanting to lend his Young Man and Death to a Germanic country. In 1874, he refused the offer of Chennevières to paint the decoration of the chapel of the Virgin in the church of Sainte-Geneviève and refused six years later to decorate the Sorbonne: “I believe I am more useful for another task; I want to remain a painter of paintings. He received the insignia of Knight of the Legion of Honor on August 4, 1875, which attests to his official recognition and he was very flattered. In his speech, Henri Wallon, says “What is he preparing for us now? It is the secret of the Sphinx, that another Oedipus could interrogate” and it is precisely at the following Salon, in 1876, that he made a remarkable return.

Moreau presented himself at the 1876 Salon with three important works: Hercules and the Hydra of Lerna, Salome Dancing before Herod and The Apparition; he also exhibited a Saint Sebastian. The Apparition has a particular characteristic: it is a watercolor, a pictorial technique that will make it popular with amateurs. Although Moreau presents himself as a history painter, what the critics note above all is the strangeness with which the artist treats these subjects. He who had theorized the necessary wealth is here accused of “wasted wealth”. But the one who best understands the specificity of Gustave Moreau”s art, while denigrating it, is Émile Zola:

“This return to imagination took on a particularly curious character in Gustave Moreau. He did not throw himself back into Romanticism, as one might have expected; he disdained the Romantic fever, the easy effects of colors, the overflowing of a brush in search of inspiration to cover the canvas with contrasts of light and shadow to the point of hurting the eyes. No! Gustave Moreau devotes himself to symbolism. His talent consists in taking subjects already treated by other painters and representing them in another way, much more skillfully. He paints these reveries – but not those simple and benevolent reveries as we all do, sinners that we are – but subtle, complicated, enigmatic reveries, the meaning of which we cannot immediately unravel. What is, in our time, the meaning of such a painting? – It is difficult to answer this question. I see in it, I repeat, a simple reaction against the contemporary world. It does not represent a great danger for science. One passes in front of it by shrugging the shoulders and that”s all “

– Émile Zola, The Salon of 1876

The word is dropped: symbolism. Ten years before Jean Moréas” Manifesto of Symbolism, Zola named the movement of which Moreau would become the leader.

The Universal Exhibition of 1878, which was supposed to restore the image of a defeated France in 1870, was organized by Chennevières, the same man who had proposed to Moreau the decoration of the Sainte-Geneviève church. This man, a lover of the “grand style”, decided to privilege history painting to the detriment of landscape painting, which was gaining in interest among the public. Impressionism was completely absent and Courbet was only allowed to show one work because of his participation in the Paris Commune. This left the field open to Moreau who presented no less than 11 works at this exhibition (six paintings and five watercolors), some of which were already known. The biblical subjects are more represented and Moreau, who had kept a horrified memory of the Paris Commune, hides behind them a very political speech on his time “The Jacob would be the angel of France stopping him in his foolish race towards the matter. The Moses, the hope in a new law represented by this cute innocent child and pushed by God. The David, the dark melancholy of the past age of tradition so dear to the great minds crying over the great modern decomposition, the angel at his feet ready to give back the inspiration if one agrees to listen to God. Zola, annoyed not to see impressionism represented at this exhibition does not hide nevertheless how much The Sphinx guessed it troubles him. For him Moreau has nothing to do with the other artists present here, he is unclassifiable. Gustave Moreau”s presence at this World”s Fair had a lasting impact on many painters and poets who would be called symbolists. Among them, the young Odilon Redon admires the works of the master, “The excellent quality of his mind and the refinement he puts in the practice of the art of painting, place him apart in the world of contemporary fine arts.

In 1880, Moreau made his last Salon. He presented a Galatea and a Helen. He was promoted Officer of the Legion of Honor on January 26, 1882. The Paris Opera called on him to design the costumes for Sapho, he sent 30 costume designs and was invited to the premiere on April 2, 1884. In 1887, he was appointed member of the jury for the admission to the Beaux-Arts of the future Universal Exhibition of 1889. Elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts on November 22, 1888, Moreau took the place of Gustave Boulanger, who had obtained this place against Moreau in 1882 and who had also obtained the Prix de Rome against Moreau in 1849. This official recognition surprised the critics, who were astonished to see the hermit Moreau enter the academic circles that he despised.

Although his Salon works were critically acclaimed, they also attracted many amateurs and the wealthy. This is the paradox of Gustave Moreau”s success: he sells little but allows himself to choose his buyers because his buyers are very wealthy, which makes him an “obscurely famous” painter in the words of Ary Renan. The Countess Greffulhe, the Rothschilds, Beer, Goldschmidt, Mant; all were ready to pay very high prices to obtain works from an artist reluctant to part with his creations. It was from 1879 onwards that his income improved abruptly, he earned four times more in four years than he had in eighteen years. “From 1878, I have done only very small things” he writes, because the order presses and two amateurs insist on Moreau to obtain works (especially watercolors): Charles Hayem and Antoni Roux. Hayem was fascinated by Moreau”s submissions to the 1876 Salon and then to the 1878 World”s Fair, and acquired The Apparition and Phaeton. He commissioned more and more watercolors and by the end of 1890, he already owned more than fifty works by the painter. His determination is such that some Parisian amateurs think that it is necessary to go through him to obtain a work by Moreau. Antoni Roux visited the painter in his studio and maintained friendly relations with him. In 1879, he formulated the project of having the Fables of La Fontaine illustrated in watercolor by the best artists of his time in order to take advantage of this technique which was experiencing a revival. Moreau did 25 of them and chose mainly mythological fables, introducing elements related to India, as he was interested in the arts of this country and remembering that Pilpay was, with Aesop, one of the sources of La Fontaine. When Roux presented some of the watercolors to the public in 1881 at the Durand-Ruel gallery, the critics were unanimous as to the superiority of Moreau”s art. Charles Blanc, the author of the Grammar, admired: “It would be necessary to create a word especially if one wanted to characterize the talent of Gustave Moreau, the word colorism, for example, which would say well what there is of excessive, of superb and of prodigious in his love for the color”. Aware of this success, Roux entrusted Moreau with the exclusivity of the other watercolors, convinced of the superiority of his talent. Roux asks him for more animals, Moreau goes to the Jardin des Plantes to study thoroughly all kinds of animals, until Roux himself delivers frogs to him. In total, 63 pieces were made by Moreau and exhibited, along with four large watercolors, at a solo exhibition in 1886 in the Goupil Gallery – in London and Paris – thanks to Theo Van Gogh, the gallery”s manager. This was Gustave Moreau”s only solo exhibition during his lifetime.

But in addition to being a social phenomenon, Gustave Moreau is a true literary phenomenon. First of all, Gustave Moreau was a great reader and had a large library in which all the classics of ancient literature as well as the French and foreign classics of the modern era (Montaigne, Rabelais, Malherbe, Boileau, La Bruyère, Cervantes, Shakespeare…) were well placed. Among his contemporaries, he admired Alfred de Vigny, Leconte de Lisle, Gérard de Nerval and Baudelaire, whose Fleurs du Mal were dedicated by Caroline Aupick, the poet”s mother. Moreau was a great admirer of Baudelaire”s work and the house of his uncle, Louis Emon, adjoined that of Mrs. Aupick. However, there is no evidence of a meeting between the painter and the poet. Moreau wrote little and the only text signed by his hand known during his lifetime is the eulogy of Gustave Boulanger, the painter he succeeded at the Academy of Fine Arts. His other texts are private, they are his abundant correspondence as well as the notes he wrote about his works, in particular to explain them to his deaf mother and to a lesser extent to certain amateurs eager for explanations. He also wrote numerous notes and comments in the margins of his drawings. Although he did not publish anything, Moreau confessed “I have already suffered too much in my whole life as an artist from this stupid and absurd opinion that I am too literary for a painter”. This label of literary painter has nothing to do with a compliment, Moreau defines this appellation as “painter not really painter”. However he seems to deserve this appellation and for two reasons; firstly because his works are imprinted with literature and in particular with Fable (mythology, Bible, legends) and secondly because literature is imprinted in his works. Moreau is certainly the painter who most inspired the Parnassian and symbolist poets and the collection of poems Le Parnasse contemporain published in 1866 already contains many poems inspired by Moreau”s works. Huysmans in particular gives a place of choice to Gustave Moreau in À rebours since the character of des Esseintes contemplates his Salomé and dreams before her. Moreau is always present in his following novels En rade and La Cathédrale. Jean Lorrain tells in Monsieur de Phocas the story of a young man who goes to the Gustave Moreau museum, bewitched. Oscar Wilde, for his Salome, was inspired by Gustave Moreau”s The Apparition, and this is evident in Aubrey Bearsley”s illustration of the play with the head of St. John the Baptist floating as in Moreau”s work. Finally, Marcel Proust is certainly the one who quotes Gustave Moreau the most. Between 1898 and 1900 he wrote Notes sur le monde mystérieux de Gustave Moreau, which was not published during his lifetime. He knew Moreau”s work well through Charles Ephrussi. In short, there was, according to the expression of Mireille Dottin-Orsini, a “Gustave Moreau literature”.

This period of success ended in a period of mourning for Gustave Moreau. He lost his mother in 1884 and then Alexandrine Dureux in 1890. When his mother died, he wandered to the Tuileries, where she used to take him as a child, and then found refuge at Alexandrine Dureux”s house. This death was a break in his life, he wrote to his architect in 1895 “I am now, since the death of my mother, like a student, having reduced everything that touches my person to the only essential. In 1885, following the death of his mother, he undertook a first inventory of his works, including those in his possession and those in the possession of collectors. Moreau then became even closer to Alexandrine Dureux but she fell ill. For five months, he visited her at the clinic where she was being treated until the disease took her away in March 1890. Gustave Moreau himself designed Alexandrine Dureux”s funeral monument in the Montmartre cemetery and had the initials A and G engraved on it. He then embarked on a series of symbolist compositions in which a meditation on death dominated, such as The Fates and the Angel of Death and Orpheus on the Tomb of Eurydice, painted in memory of Alexandrine Dureux.

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Preparing for posterity

During this last period of his life, Gustave Moreau prepared for posterity by becoming the teacher of young artists who would count among the avant-garde of the twentieth century, as well as by the creation during his lifetime of his own museum, which would open after his death.

Gustave Moreau first gave private lessons to young people from wealthy families. Among them were George Desvallières, Jean-Georges Cornélius and Georges Méliès who refused to join the family shoe factory and preferred to study fine arts. Nevertheless, Moreau did not immediately accept to become an official teacher. He had already turned down a position as a teacher at the evening school at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1888 to replace his friend Léon Bonnat, because at the time Alexandrine Dureux was ill. However, when Jules-Élie Delaunay asked him on his deathbed to take his place as a teacher, he felt morally obliged to accept. He replaced him temporarily at first and then became a full professor in one of the three workshops at the École des Beaux-Arts, the others being those of Jean-Léon Gérôme and Léon Bonnat. A much appreciated teacher, his numerous students include Adolphe Beaufrère, Maurice Boudot-Lamotte, Auguste Brouet, Henri Matisse, Edgar Maxence, Raoul du Gardier, Albert Marquet, Léon Lehmann, Eugène Martel, Simon Bussy, Georges Rouault, Léon Printemps, Henri Manguin, Charles Camoin, François Joseph Girot, Charles Milcendeau. Moreau rarely invites his students to his studio in the rue de La Rochefoucauld, he prefers to take them to the Louvre to copy the great masters according to their tastes and temperament. And when he invites them to his studio – rue de La Rochefoucauld – he receives them in an apartment whose walls are covered with copies that he has made himself in Italy and in the Louvre. For he wanted his students to immerse themselves in the art of the ancients, as he had done as a young student in Picot”s studio, which adjoined his home. Moreover, Moreau always remained grateful for his master”s teaching, since he always had his name followed by the words “Pupil of Picot” until his last Salon in 1880. Like Picot, he took his students to copy from the masters in the Louvre in the afternoons and, like Picot, he earned a reputation as an appreciated and liberal teacher who attracted all young people who loved independence. Moreau was both a teacher and a friend, he did not hesitate to point out the flaws in his students” productions but also recognized their merits and always invited them to find their own sources of inspiration and to work harder: “Exercise your brain, think for yourself. What does it matter to me if you stay for hours in front of your easel if you sleep? But Moreau did not ask his students to make slavish copies or facsimiles. He wanted his students to get into the atmosphere and the technique of the painters they copied and he recognized the genius of a great diversity of painters from all periods. One day he affirmed his admiration for Raphael and the next day who could affirm that there was no greater master than Chardin. Matisse said: “Moreau knew how to distinguish and show us which were the greatest painters, while Bouguereau invited us to admire Jules Romain”. Moreau is also singular in his relationship to color; for unlike other workshops that only allowed students to paint once their drawing was well established, Moreau enjoins his students to use color very early on. He thus broke with an ingresco tradition according to which “drawing is the probity of art” but he did not subscribe either to the impressionist approach which wanted nothing to come between the painter”s vision and the canvas; Moreau said on the contrary that the color must be in adequacy with the painter”s idea, it must be in the service of his imagination and not of nature. His final advice was as follows:

“To make simple and to move away from the smooth and clean. The modern tendency leads us to the simplicity of the means and to the complication of the expressions. Copy the austerity of the primitive masters and see only that! In art from now on, as the education of the masses still vague is done little by little, there is no more need to finish and to push until the combed, not more than in literature we will like the rhetoric and the well finished periods. Also the next art – which already condemns the methods of Bouguereau and others – will ask us only for indications, sketches, but also the infinite variety of multiple impressions. We will still be able to finish, but without looking like it.”

When Gustave Moreau died in 1898, he left behind disoriented students among whom two tendencies emerged, one idealistic, carried by Rouault, Maxence and Marcel-Béronneau, and the other, naturalist, carried by Matisse, Evenepoel and Marquet. He was the last great teacher at the École des Beaux-Arts; even David and Ingres did not have as many prestigious students as he did. His students were noticed at the 1905 Salon d”Automne for the modernity of their painting and recognized that they had found in Gustave Moreau an outstanding master to the point of organizing joint exhibitions in 1910 and again in 1926 to celebrate the centenary of his birth.

Already at the age of 36, almost unknown, Gustave Moreau was thinking of keeping his studio. “This evening, December 24, 1862. I think of my death and the fate of my poor little works and all these compositions that I take the trouble to put together. Separated, they perish; taken together, they give a little of what I was as an artist and of the environment in which I liked to dream”. After the death of his mother and Alexandrine Dureux, Moreau found himself alone and weakened. He had been operated on for the stone disease in 1892 and since then he went every year to Evian for a cure. Evenepoel writes: “He is getting a little older, the dear man, his hair is getting sparse on the top of his head, he really has a few dozen left and he told me that he suffers from stomach and bladder”. Moreau renounces the idea of a posthumous exhibition at the end of which his works would be sold and thus dispersed, as was the case with Delacroix, Corot, Millet and many others. This idea had been the artist”s for a long time, on the advice of Puvis de Chavannes, and it was included in his mother”s will in 1883. But Moreau changed his mind, he wanted a museum. He formulated the idea in 1893 and thought of building a place in Neuilly. His project became a reality in 1895 when he called upon the architect Albert Lafon (1860-1935) to enlarge and transform the family home which was to become his museum. Moreau then carefully prepared the presentation of the museum, undertaking the realization in large format – museum format – of several compositions, writing and repeating several times the notes of his main works to explain them to future visitors, sorting the drawings and arranging the rooms of the museum.

He finalized his will in September 1897 where he bequeathed “his house located at 14, rue de La Rochefoucauld, with all that it contains: paintings, drawings, cartoons, etc., work of fifty years, as well as what is contained in the said house in the former apartments formerly occupied by my father and my mother, to the State, or in its absence, to the École des Beaux-Arts, or, in its absence, to the Institut de France (Académie des beaux-Arts) on the express condition that this collection will always be kept – this would be my dearest wish – or at least for as long as possible, preserving this overall character which will always allow the sum of the artist”s work and efforts during his life to be noted.

Gustave Moreau died of stomach cancer on April 18, 1898 at the age of 72. The funeral took place in the church of the Sainte-Trinité in a discretion wished by the artist, which did not prevent many students, friends and admirers from attending, such as Frédéric de Courcy, Edgar Degas, Odilon Redon, Puvis de Chavannes, Jean Lorrain, Léonce Bénédite and Robert de Montesquiou. He was buried in Paris at the Montmartre cemetery (22nd division), in the family vault and near Alexandrine Dureux.

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Moreau”s view of sculpture

The first real contact between Moreau and ancient sculpture took place during his Italian stay in Rome, in the company of the sculptor Chapu. He studied the proportions of ancient sculptures on the orders of his father, who reproached him for his exclusive interest in the Renaissance. Nevertheless, in Rome, he admired the very modern Michelangelo (both painter and sculptor) and Nicolas Poussin (only painter) whose perfect proportions he considered to come from the study of ancient sculptures. It is really in Naples, at the Borbonico museum, that Moreau copied abundantly the ancient sculpture.

Moreau has a very critical look on the sculpture of his time and the little regard he has towards this discipline is illustrated by his library. Indeed, there are only three works dealing with sculpture: the Grammar of Charles Blanc, a monograph of Carpeaux by Chesneau and Esthétique du sculpteur, philosophie de l”art plastique by Henry Jouin. Touching this last work which is a gift of the author, Moreau removed the first nine pages, meaning by this his refusal of any theoretical discourse. But his criticism is not only theoretical, Moreau lives in full period of statuomania and the relative disinterest for the sculpture could be explained by this phenomenon. Among his contemporaries, even Rodin does not find grace in his eyes, he reproaches him for “idiotic mixtures of brewery mysticism and pornography of the boulevardière, and with that talent, a lot of talent, but spoiled by a lot of charlatanism”. In his personal collections, Moreau only possessed sculptures by his friends, mainly unknown sculptors such as Pierre Loison and Pierre-Alexandre Schoenewerk. He nevertheless owned two bronzes by Barye which served as models for his paintings.

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The sculpture in painting

Indeed, for Moreau, sculpture is above all an aid to painting. He used sculpture as soon as he returned from Italy to help in the conception of his paintings. Thus he made a model for his Oedipus to realize the “shadows cast by the man on the rock and the monster on the man”. This method is similar to the two painters he admired in Rome: Michelangelo and Poussin. He is not the only contemporary painter to use wax statuettes in his work, we find this practice with his friend Edgar Degas and Ernest Meissonier, both sculptors. A total of fifteen wax statuettes were discovered after his death at his home.

Sculpture projects

There is nevertheless a personal note from Moreau dated November 10, 1894, which casts doubt on this purely utilitarian use of the sculpture:

“There are several projects that I am considering and that, perhaps, I will never be able to carry out. 1° – Model in clay or wax compositions with one or two figures which, cast in bronze, would give better than in painting the measure of my qualities and my science in the rhythm and the arabesque of the lines (to be developed).”

Among Moreau”s drawings there are 16 sculpture projects. Among them, only four are realized in wax and four are the object of a project of edition in bronze. These projects are mostly related to existing paintings like Prometheus, Jacob and the Angel or Leda. But there are two exclusive projects, a winged figure for a tomb and a Joan of Arc. For the latter, Moreau did not hide his admiration for Frémiet”s Joan of Arc. Moreau never carried out these publishing projects.

All his life, Gustave Moreau collected drawings, photographs and illustrated books, plaster casts that served as iconographic funds for his pictorial inspiration.

In his will, written on September 10, 1897, Moreau bequeathed to the French State his studio, located in the private mansion at 14, rue de La Rochefoucauld (9th arrondissement of Paris), containing nearly 850 paintings or cartoons, 350 watercolors, more than 13,000 drawings and tracings, and 15 wax sculptures. The studio, transformed into a museum, was officially opened to the public on January 13, 1903.

In 1912, André Breton visited this museum and was deeply moved by the works of the painter:

“The discovery of the Gustave Moreau Museum, when I was sixteen, has forever conditioned my way of loving. Beauty, love, it is there that I had the revelation through some faces, some poses of women. The “type” of these women probably hid all the others from me: it was a complete spell. The myths, here reattized as nowhere else, must have played. This woman who, almost without changing her appearance, is in turn Salome, Helen, Delilah, the Chimera, Semele, imposes herself as their indistinct incarnation. She draws her prestige from them and thus fixes her features in the eternal. This museum, nothing for me proceeds at the same time from the temple such as it should be and from the “bad place” such as… it could be too. I have always dreamed of breaking into it at night, with a lantern. To catch the Fairy with the griffin in the shadows, to catch the inter-signs that flutter from the Pretenders to the Apparition, halfway between the outer eye and the inner eye brought to incandescence.”

Léonce Bénédite defines four cycles in Moreau”s work: the cycle of man, the cycle of woman, the cycle of the lyre and the cycle of death.

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Human cycle

The Cycle of Man is in fact the cycle of heroism. One finds there heroes of mythology as of the Bible. These heroes are as much beautiful reckless as great misunderstood and voluntary sacrifices. The men in Moreau”s work often have an androgynous figure but there are more muscular ones like Hercules, Prometheus or the centaur.

These muscular men can embody matter versus idea, nature versus spirit, through oppositions such as Jacob and the Angel or the Dead Poet carried by a centaur. For Moreau, the opposition of nature and spirit constitutes the law of the world and the legendary subjects make it possible to tell this struggle in an ideal form so that the spirit, in victorious freedom, finally frees itself from nature. Thus, about Jacob and the Angel, Moreau says that Jacob with the Michelangelesque musculature: “is the symbol of the physical force against the superior moral force & that in this fight it is said that Jacob did not see his antagonist enemy and sought him by exhausting his forces” while this Raphaelian angel is the one who stops him “in his idiotic race towards the matter”. In poète mort porté par un centaure, the material and literally animal aspect is embodied in the character of the centaur while the frail poet with the androgynous figure embodies the idea, this duality echoes the duality of human nature, both body and spirit.

But Moreau”s work is not only a praise of the poet and the artist, the hero also occupies an important place, a hero often drawn from Greek mythology. They are civilizing heroes represented in a static way because Moreau refuses to represent movement, faithful to his beautiful inertia. Among these heroes is Prometheus who, according to the Platonic account, gives fire and the knowledge of the arts to mankind, and it is precisely to Plato that Moreau refers when he talks about this painting to his friend Alexandre Destouches. His Hercules and the Hydra of Lerna presents Hercules as a civilizing and solar hero fighting against the darkness that stands in the way of civilization, embodied by the Hydra.

As for the androgynous men, so present in Moreau”s work, they seem cut off from the world as if preserved from ugliness and old age and are found in the figures of Narcissus, Alexander, Orpheus, Ganymede or Saint Sebastian.

These male figures are nevertheless doomed to destruction, perfect embodiments of dedication and sacrifice.

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Woman”s cycle

The Cycle of the Woman is both the cycle of beauty and cruelty in disguise. It is thus a strongly contrasted opposition which is drawn between the man and the woman.

According to Hervé Gauville, writer, art critic and journalist at Libération from 1981 to 2006, Gustave Moreau would be “a man with a mother” showing “immaturity” and “misogyny”, who would not like women.

Gustave Moreau has a vision of the woman close to Schopenhauer of which he owns the anthology published by Bourdeau in 1880, he is in that a man of his time sharing a misogyny which is found in Baudelaire or Alfred de Vigny, two poets he holds in high esteem. In fact, Moreau draws from the religious tradition this image of the sinful woman and eternal source of evil. But he then faces a very old problem in the representation of the female ugliness, that this ugliness is impossible by essence. Indeed, in the nineteenth century, it is through the woman”s body that artists represent beauty, it is absolutely unthinkable to represent ugly women to represent this moral ugliness. The solution is thus to accompany them with symbolic elements likely to evoke this ugliness. Thus, the most obvious figure of moral ugliness is the hybrid which is, as we have seen with the figure of the centaur, closer to matter. One finds then among these impenetrable and seductive monsters sphinxes, chimeras, fairies or sirens. The mermaid dominating the poet in Le Poète et la Sirène of 1893 is for example a giantess, disproportionately larger than the poet at his feet; she seizes him by the hand and threatens him with her eyes. But this limit between hybridity and the woman herself is very thin since his Chimera of 1867 figures a chimera clinging to a centaur-pegasus; yet it has nothing of the hybrid monster spitting flames, it is quite simply a woman. For Moreau multiplied the subjects of femmes fatales, especially in his watercolors of the 1880s, at a time when the number of his commissions was exploding. Thus, we find countless Salome, Delilah, Medea until this drawing entitled The Victims which represents a giant woman with a vicious smile playing with the bodies of disarticulated men as if they were living toys, whom she tortures by sticking her fingers into their heads. This obsession with the monstrous woman finds its most obvious representation in The Chimeras, where the artist depicts countless women playing with fantastic animals symbolizing the empire of the senses, such as goats, bulls, snakes, unicorns and griffins. They are accompanied by hybrid women such as snake-women, butterfly-women and dragonflies. The painter describes his work as follows in his note: “This island of fantastic dreams contains all the forms of passion, fantasy, caprice in the woman, the woman in its primary essence, the unconscious being, crazy about the unknown, the mystery, in love with evil in the form of perverse and diabolical seduction. It is thus “the woman in her first essence” that he paints but there is a possible redemption, which he represents here in the form of bell towers, the Christian faith leading to a humble and modest life leading to the domination of its passions and even to holiness.

Nevertheless, Gustave Moreau is also a tender admirer of the beauty of women through figures such as Eve, Aphrodite, Venus, Erigone, Dejanira or Galatea. But when the woman is beautiful, chaste and pure, she is either surrounded by griffins or locked in a cave, she is simply inaccessible. And it is by this inaccessibility that these virginal beauties make men suffer, only the dream is allowed about them, a simply platonic adoration. For in Moreau, sexuality is only beautiful when dreamed of and the possessed flesh is not a source of voluptuousness but of sadness. This is the case of his Galatea of the 1880 Salon, whose body captures and reflects the light by its whiteness, the Cyclops in the background looks at her with an envious eye as a mise en abyme of the one who looks at the painting; but Galatea, disdainful, pouts, she shows herself but refuses. Moreau even goes so far as to adapt in painting subjects reputed to be scabrous, but draping them in his ideal of chastity, such as the Daughters of Thespius. The myth tells us that King Thespius, concerned about his descendants and wishing to prove his gratitude to the hero who had slaughtered the lion of Cithéron, made sure that he was united with his 50 daughters. However, there is no voluptuousness in this work, on the contrary, these women are also inaccessible because the Hercules at the center of the composition has a posture of thinker, according to the words of Moreau: “He waits, he meditates this great act of generation; he feels in him the immense sadness of the one who is going to create, who is going to give life”. Here the women are also idealized bodies, not in the sense of flesh but in the sense of a non-carnal body very far from the lowly material beings described above. On the contrary, these female bodies perfectly embody the idea of beautiful inertia so dear to Moreau.

There are exceptions in Moreau”s work to these women who are either inaccessible or cruel. This is the case, for example, of the Thracian girl who collects Orpheus” head and contemplates it with compassion, in a pious attitude. Moreau says thus: “A young girl finds Orpheus” head and lyre floating on the water of a stream. She collects them piously”. Moreover, the maternal role is also seen positively by Moreau, his first painting was a Pietà for which the Virgin was represented under the features of her own mother. This maternal role is found in more unexpected works such as Leda, a myth usually chosen for its erotic content. On the contrary, the theme is syncretistically assimilated to the Annunciation or the mystery of the Incarnation. The swan is nimbed and replaces the dove normally present in the Annunciation, making Leda a kind of Virgin Mary, a real coronation of the woman.

Cycle of the lyre

This cycle is named by Ary Renan Cycle du Poète and by Léonce Bénédite Cycle de la Lyre. The lyre is here the redemptive emblem of a new religion. This perception of the lyre as a religious symbol in Moreau”s work is found both in the writings of Ary Renan and Léonce Bénédite. The heroes of the cycle of the lyre are civilizers. This cycle ends with Les Lyres mortes, an unfinished work. This cycle is mainly treated by the watercolor technique.

First of all, it is important to understand that Moreau is part of a great tradition, that of “ut pictura poesis”, an adage of Horace meaning that painting is the counterpart of poetry, its plastic equivalent. This adage, which Leonardo da Vinci made his own, allows us to understand Gustave Moreau”s relationship with the poet, the poet is not only the poet, it is the artist in general.

This figure of the poet appears for the first time with Orpheus, which opens the cycle. Orpheus is a particular figure since the first Christians had adopted him as a messianic image, which already says a lot about the role Moreau attributes to the poet. But Moreau is not content with the figure of Orpheus, we also find Tyrteus, Hesiod and Sappho. In his later works, he abandons historical or mythical names to refer to the poet only as “poet”, he then becomes somewhat anonymous, embodying more than ever the image of the artist in general.

The poet in Moreau”s work is always very young, twenty years old at the most, and his frail arms carry with ease a monumental and richly decorated lyre. He embodies the very soul trapped in matter but hardly attached to its fragile bodily envelope. Because of his spiritual nature, he is in the first rank of humanity before the kings and warriors as in The Magi for example where the musician occupies the first rank or in Ulysses and the Pretenders where it is the singer Phemius who is in the center of the picture, saved from the arrows by the innocence of his art. For the art of the poet is always beneficent, divine and consoling; the poet even possesses the prophetic faculty, he possesses like Apollo the capacity to see the future.

The figure of the poet is part of a taste for androgynous bodies typical of late 19th century France. This Neoplatonic theme was imposed through archaeological discoveries and fascinated art critics such as Joséphin Peladan who mentioned in his work De l”Androgyne de l”Apollon de Piombino discovered in 1832. Poetry is for Moreau the place where the masculine and the feminine meet and merge, he says himself that his poet is a figure “soft of aspect, completely draped and very feminine. It is almost a woman”. His poets are thus truly androgynous with notably these long hair and these frail bodies which have for function to disincarnate the poet so that he is closer to the idea than to the matter contrary to Jacob or to the Centaur seen previously. Thus, the proximity with the female body does not bring the poet closer to a lowly material being, on the contrary, this body brings him closer to immateriality.

But there are also poets in Moreau”s work who are women, such as Sapho or Saint Cécile, who also share androgynous characters with a slightly pronounced femininity. Like the male poets, they have this role of elevation above matter; thus, in Sainte Cécile endormant un satyre à ses pieds, sainte Cécile incarnates the spirit while the satyre incarnates the matter, a same opposition that we already found in Poète mort porté par un centaure. The female figures of the poetic world are nevertheless more diverse, there is for example the figure of the Muse who often accompanies the poet as in Hesiod and the Muse and embodies like him the highest abstractions. The Muse can also embody a consoling and maternal figure as in Les Plaintes du poète for example where the poet comes to snuggle with her. The mermaid, usually a cruel figure, can play a protective role in Moreau”s poetic universe. This is notably the case in La Sirène et le Poète where the mermaid protects the sleeping and defenseless poet.

The figure of the poet is an opportunity for Moreau to show his taste for the East with, for example, the Arabian Poet (Persian) inspired by Persian miniatures. It is also the case of his Peri that he declines on several supports, including a fan for his friend Alexandrine Dureux. Proust recognizes in this Peri the very archetype of the poet, she literally flies thanks to her griffin and thus rises from the gangue of matter towards the divine world. This Peri is in fact the oriental counterpart of the Muse in Moreau”s work and her closed eyes translate, as for the other poetic figures, her poetic inspiration and her inner vision. Sometimes the East and the West meet more directly with the Sapho of 1872 for example, which is obviously a Greek figure but whose dress is inspired by a Japanese print.

The fate of the poet, always tragic, is often misunderstood and forgotten. Moreau says “How many have perished without funeral at the bottom of solitary ravines. Certainly it happens that a charitable centaur collects the victim and thinks, in his simple heart, that the man is insane; but the oblivion, like a dormant water, buries the majority “. It is this pessimistic reflection that completes the cycle of the lyre with the work Les Lyres mortes. This work symbolizes, at the same time as the sacrifice of the poets, the triumph of the idea on the matter, the triumph of the eternal by the gigantic figure of an archangel representing the triumphant Christianity.

Gustave Moreau borrowed heavily from the Renaissance masters, introducing decorative ornaments to the point of saturating the canvas (The Triumph of Alexander the Great, 1873-1890; Galatea, 1880) and also incorporating exotic and oriental motifs into his pictorial compositions (Jupiter and Semele, 1889-1895), which he sometimes reworked and enlarged later. When he painted for himself and not for the Salons, Moreau could have a very different style. This can be seen, for example, in the roughly painted Scottish Rider (c. 1854), which contrasts with his more polished Salon paintings. In 1870, his painting Birth of Venus heralds his sketches, some of which, made from 1875 onwards, are close to what will be abstract painting.

Although Moreau refused any theoretical discourse as we have seen above concerning sculpture, he had for himself two guiding principles for his art: beautiful inertia and necessary richness. These principles were defined by Moreau himself and are known to us through Ary Renan.

The beautiful inertia

The beautiful inertia is the representation of the decisive moment from the moral point of view rather than the pathetic moment from the scenic point of view. It is thus the thought rather than the action that he paints.

This idea of beautiful inertia also comes from the observation of ancient sculpture, especially during his stay in Naples, at the Borbonico Museum. In fact, Moreau is no stranger to the “noble simplicity and calm grandeur” of Winckelmann who saw in Greek sculpture the model to follow for all the arts and said in his Reflections on the imitation of Greek works in sculpture and painting: “Attitudes and movements whose violence, fire and impetuosity are incompatible with this calm grandeur of which I speak, were regarded by the Greeks as defective, and this defect was called Parenthyrsis. Moreau even speaks of the figures in his paintings as “living statues” or “animated caryatids”. There is in sum in Moreau, through this concept of beautiful inertia a categorical refusal of the copy on nature and in opposition, an idealization of the body. But this idealization of the body is not an end in itself, it aims at manifesting the dream and the immaterial. Commenting on Michelangelo”s Prophets and Sibyls in the Sistine Chapel, Moreau says this:

“All these figures seem to be frozen in a gesture of ideal somnambulism; they are unconscious of the movement they are executing, absorbed in reverie to the point of being carried away to other worlds. It is only this feeling of deep reverie that saves them from monotony. What do they do? What do they think? Where do they go? Under the empire of which passions are they? We do not rest, we do not act, we do not meditate, we do not walk, we do not cry, we do not think in this way on our planet… “

It is this way that Moreau tried to follow in all his work from the Pretenders of the first years to the Argonauts of the last.

Also read, biographies – Kazimir Malevich

The necessary wealth

The necessary richness is a decorative taste pushed to the extreme. Moreau holds this principle from the observation of the ancients of whom he says that they always tried to put in their works what there was of more beautiful and richer in their time. This abundant ornamentation allowed them to create “universes beyond the real” and it is this that Moreau aims in these works. He thus says:

“Whether they come from Flanders or Umbria, from Venice or Cologne, the masters have tried to create a universe beyond the real. They went so far as to imagine skies, clouds, sites, architectures, unusual perspectives and holding the prodigy, Which cities build a Carpaccio or a Memling to walk there saint Ursula, and which Tarsus builds Claude Lorrain for his small Cleopatra! What valleys dug in the sapphire open the Lombard painters! Finally, everywhere, in the walls of the museums, that windows open on artificial worlds which seem cut in the marble and the gold and on necessarily chimerical spaces!

This necessary richness, thus this taste for the creation of universes exceeding reality, authorizes him to all the fantasies and all the anachronisms, of which among other things the mixture of Western and Asian antique art.

Because of his discretion and his distaste for the Salons, only one work of Gustave Moreau”s can be seen during his lifetime: the Orpheus in the Musée du Luxembourg. The knowledge of his work is therefore difficult and he quickly falls into the oblivion of art history, long confused with the painters pompiers. A catalog of his works was therefore an urgent undertaking and it was first Alfred Baillehache-Lamotte who compiled a handwritten catalog called Nouveau catalog de l”œuvre de Gustave Moreau, updated in 1915. The opening of the Gustave Moreau Museum in 1903 did not make the painter”s work known either, since the first visitors who went there were disappointed to see only unfinished works. It was not until half a century later that an exhibition was held at the Louvre in 1961 and a book entitled L”Art fantastique de Gustave Moreau by Ragnar von Holten and André Breton was published. From then on, it is easy to understand that the only way to see Gustave Moreau”s work in all its diversity is to go to temporary exhibitions. Indeed, the Gustave Moreau Museum has by far the largest number of works, but these works are often unfinished and were not known to his contemporaries. While his more finished history paintings, and a number of watercolors are found in many museums, mainly in France, the United States and Japan.

Also read, biographies – John Kapodistrias

Bibliography

: document used as a source for the writing of this article.

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