Gustave Moreau: The Complete Story
Gustave Moreau was the French Symbolist who painted myth as a fever dream. His canvases of gods, saints and femmes fatales drip with jewel like detail, gold and strange ornament, scenes half from the Bible, half from a hallucination. He was also one of the great teachers of his age, the man who set the future leaders of modern colour loose.
His pupils included Matisse and the painters who would become the Fauves.
Born: Paris, 1826
Known for: Symbolist myth, Salome, jewel like detail, teaching the Fauves
Died: Paris, 1898
Myth soaked in jewels
Moreau returned again and again to charged ancient stories: Salome dancing before Herod, Oedipus facing the Sphinx, Jupiter blazing before Semele. He loaded them with intricate pattern until the surface glitters like treasure. See what is symbolism in art.
In The Apparition, Salome recoils as the severed head of John the Baptist floats glowing in mid air. It is gorgeous and unsettling at once, the Symbolist mood in a single image. See what is history painting.
Dreams against the everyday
While the Impressionists painted sunlight and modern life, Moreau went inward and backward, into legend, desire and dread. He wanted art to suggest, not to describe.
His delicate watercolours and oil sketches can be looser and stranger than the finished pictures, pure imagination set down fast. See what is watercolor.
The teacher of the Fauves
As a professor at the Paris fine art school, Moreau was famously generous and open minded. He told students to follow their own nature, and his studio produced Henri Matisse, Georges Rouault and Albert Marquet.
It is a strange twist that the dreamy Symbolist trained the artists who would unleash wild, flat colour on the world a few years later.
What readers want to know about Gustave Moreau
What is Gustave Moreau famous for?
Jewel like Symbolist paintings of myth, especially his many versions of Salome.
Who did he teach?
Matisse, Rouault and Marquet, among the founders of Fauvism, at the Paris fine art school.
What is The Apparition?
His painting of Salome confronted by the glowing, floating head of John the Baptist.
When did he die?
In 1898, in Paris.
Why the dream still glitters
Moreau turned his Paris home and studio into a museum and left it to the nation, so his crowded, glowing world survives intact. Walk through the Musee Gustave Moreau today and you step straight into the Symbolist imagination, room after room.
One last detail. He kept thousands of works in that house, finished and unfinished, stacked on sliding panels he designed himself. The most private of painters arranged his own afterlife as a single, overwhelming gift to the public.