Gustave Moreau was a French painter, born in Paris in 1826, who died there in 1898. He is the best known painter of French Symbolism, famous for jewelled, dreamlike pictures of Salome and other figures from the Bible and Greek myth. He taught Henri Matisse and Georges Rouault, and he turned his own house into a museum of his work.
People type his name for one picture above all: a dancer in a hall of gems pointing at the severed head of John the Baptist, which floats in the air before her.
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The Apparition was a hit when it went up at the Paris Salon in 1876, beside a second Salome in oil, and the critics argued over both. Moreau did not follow it with more. In 1880 he sent his last pictures to the Salon, and after that his only solo exhibition came in 1886, at the Galerie Goupil in Paris.
What he did with his last twenty years is stranger than any of his pictures. In 1895 he had his family house rebuilt around two enormous studios and filled it with his own work, about 1,200 paintings and thousands of drawings, arranged the way he wanted them seen. He left all of it to the French state. The painter of the most talked-about Salome in Paris spent his final years building the place where his work would outlive him.
What You'll Discover
What happened at the Prix de Rome.
Who he met in Italy.
Why he left the Salon for good.
What no one in the picture sees.
Who the hermit really loved.
What his students took from him.