Background

Gustave Moreau was born on April 6, 1826, in Paris, France to a middle-class family. He was a son of Louis-Jean Marie Moreau, a prosperous architect for Paris and the Ministry of the Interior, and Adele Pauline Desmoutier, an experienced musician.

Moreau's younger sister, Camille, died at the age of fourteen.

Education

Gustave Moreau started to draw at the age of eight, and revealed the interest for art at the age of fifteen when he travelled to Italy for the first time. The first who introduced the boy to classical culture was his father.

Moreau began his secondary education at the Collège Rollin (currently the Collège-lycée Jacques-Decour) which he entered about 1836. He left the institution after his sister's death and was home schooled since then. He read many books on mythology, learned a lot about Roman architecture, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the artistic themes of the Middle East and Far East, Shakespeare, and the Bible.

At the age of eighteen, Moreau became a student of the École des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts) in Paris where he had studied for six years. One of Moreau's instructors, a neoclassical painter Francois-Edouard Picot, taught him the technical basis for his future work. Then, Moreau pursued his art studies with Théodore Chassériau who had a great influence on his artistic mindset.

Career

Gustave Moreau started his painting career at the Louvre Museum where he did many replicas of paintings. The young artist received some government commissions from the Parisian Ecole des Beaux-Arts (Schol of Fine Arts) at that time as well.

At the age of 25, Moreau organized his own studio in the house bought by his parents in Paris. A year later, the artist participated at his first Salon with his Scene from the Song of Songs and the Death of Darius, both inspired by Chassériau.

During a two-year trip to Italy, Moreau met Edgar Degas with whom he traveled around the country for a while and discovered Carpaccio's art. The trip gave Moreau a lot of subjects for his future paintings.

One of Moreau's first paintings where he used the symbolist methods, Oedipus and the Sphinx (1864), was presented at the Salon of 1864 and brought him great popularity. The work, along with The Apparition (Dance of Salome) (about 1876) and Dance of Salome (about 1876) was full of exotic eroticism shown with the dramatic lighting. A year after the Salon, the artist received an invitation to Compiègne from Emperor Napoleon III.

Prometheus and the Abduction of Europa, exhibited at Moreau's next Salon in 1869, were marked by a medal, but received many negative reviews. The painter stopped to present his works to public until 1876 when he showed three of his most famous paintings, Hercules and the Hydra, Salome Dancing Before Herod, and The Apparition. Moreau last exhibited at the Salon in 1880, presenting Galatea and Helen. The only solo exhibition of Gustave Moreau took place six years later at the Galerie Goupil in Paris.

At the end of his life, Gustave Moreau tried himself as an educator. In 1888, he was elected to the Academie des Beaux-Arts (Academy of Fine Arts). Four years later, Moreau occupied the post of a professor in charge of a studio and had held this position for six years.

Achievements

• Gustave Moreau was a prolific Symbolist painter who created more than eight hundred paintings, around fifty of which were sold while alive. One of his most famous Symbolist works, Oedipus and the Sphinx, was purchased by Prince Napoleon.
  
  There wasn't much interst in Morea's art until the 1960s when many retrospectives and exhibitions dedicated to the artist took place, including at the Louvre Museum (1961) or at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1974). Some exhibitions were subsequently organized in the early 20th century in Paris, Chicago, and New York City.
  
  The artist had an important influence on his contemporaries as well as on the coming generation of Symbolism adherents, including Odilion Redon and Jean Delville, a major Belgian symbolist painter of the early 20th century. According to a French writer André Breton, Moreau was a predecessor of Surrealism.
  
  Moreau's style is also a source of inspiration for other artists in many fields, including Japanese illustrator and scene designer Yoshitaka Amano, famous for the participation in such projects as Final Fantasy, Angel's Egg and Vampire Hunter D. The traces of Moreau's art can be also found in the works of such writers as Joris-Karl Huysmans, a Cuban-born French poet José-Maria de Heredia, and Marcel Proust.
  
  Gustave Moreau was also a gifted tutor who gave his knowledge to such great artists as Georges Rouault, Henri Matisse, Albert Marquet, Henri Charles Manguin, Edgar Maxence, and Ary Renan.
  
  Many of Moreau's artworks are now in the collection of the Musée national Gustave Moreau in Paris, founded from the artist's workshop in 1903.

Works

More photos

• drawing

  • Portrait of Eugene Lacheur

    1852

  • Male Nude and Other Studies

    1858

  • Portrait of Degas in Florence

    1858

  • Degas Portrait in the Uffizi

    1859

  • Male Nude

    1860

  • Removal Dejanira

    1860

  • Study for the Head of Oedipus

    1860

• painting

  • Self-portrait

    1850

  • Abduction of the Young Venetian Woman by Cypriot Pirates

    1851

  • Two Modern Horsewomen

    1852

  • Song of Songs

    1853

  • The Daughters of Thespius

    1853

  • Horseman

    1854

  • Pieta

    1854

  • Alice

    1855

  • Apollo and The Nine Muses

    1856

  • The Chimera

    1856

  • Hesiod and the Muse

    1857

  • Copy of Raphael's Cherub

    1858

  • View of the Villa Borthese

    1858

  • Saint George, after Vittore Carpaccio

    1858

  • Death Offers Crowns to the Winner of the Tournament

    1860

  • Hesiod and the Muses

    1860

  • The Suitors

    1862

  • The Sphinx

    1864

  • Thracian Girl Carrying the Head of Orpheus

    1864

  • View of the Garden of Madame Aupick, Mother of Baudelaire

    1864

  • After

    1865

  • Diomedes Being Eaten by his Horses

    1865

  • Jason

    1865

  • Orpheus

    1865

  • The Young Man and Death

    1865

  • Diomedes Devoured by his Horses

    1866

  • The Birth of Venus

    1866

  • The Chimera

    1867

  • The Voices

    1867

  • Pieta

    1867

  • Promethée

    1868

  • The Muses Leaving their Father Apollo to Go Out and Light the World

    1868

  • The Poet and the Saint

    1868

  • Perseus and Andromeda

    1869

  • Saint George

    1869

  • Saint Sebastian Being Tended by Saintly Women

    1869

  • The Abduction of Europa

    1869

  • The Martyred St. Sebastian

    1869

  • Death of Sappho

    1870

  • Hesiod and the Muse

    1870

  • Perseus and Andromeda

    1870

  • Saint Sebastian and His Executioners

    1870

  • The Good Samaritan

    1870

  • Sappho on the Cliff

    1872

  • Sappho on the Rocks

    1872

  • Self-portrait

    1872

  • The Sirens

    1872

  • Saint Margaret

    1873

Views

Quotations: "I believe neither in what I touch nor what I see. I only believe in what I do not see, and solely in what I feel."

"I have never looked for dream in reality or reality in dream. I have allowed my imagination free play, and I have not been led astray by it."

"I am dominated by one thing, an irresistible, burning attraction towards the abstract. The expression of human feelings and the passions of man certainly interest me deeply, but I am less concerned with expressing the motions of the soul and mind than to render visible, so to speak, the inner flashes of intuition which have something divine in their apparent insignificance and reveal magic, even divine horizons, when they are transposed into the marvellous effects of pure plastic art."

Membership

Gustave Moreau was elected to the Academie des Beaux-Arts (Academy of Fine Arts) in 1888.

• Academie des Beaux-Arts , France

  1888

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• Henri Matisse, a French painter: "He didn't set his pupils on the right road, he took them off it. He made them uneasy...He didn't show us how to paint; he roused our imagination."
  
  Henri Matisse, a French painter: "My discovery, at the age of sixteen, of the Gustave Moreau museum influenced forever my idea of love... Beauty and love were first revealed to me there through the medium of a few faces, the poses of a few women."
  
  Charles Blanc, a French art critic: "One would have to coin a word for the occasion if one wished to characterise the talent of Gustave Moreau, the word colourism for example, which would well convey all that is excessive, superb and prodigious in his love for colour.. .It is as if one were in the presence of an illuminator who had been a jeweler before becoming a painter and who, having yielded to the intoxication of colour, had ground rubies, sapphires, emeralds, topazes, opals, pearls and mother of pearl to make up his palette."
  
  Douglas W. Druick, the president of the Art Institute of Chicago: "He believed that, in order to produce art that signifies at the exalted level he envisaged, the painter must develop the 'eyes of the soul and spirit as well as the body.' Moreau associated this inner vision with the predominant role of the imagination; following current ideas, he apparently connected this faculty with 'psychological penetration' and the unconscious.... Moreau wrote that his 'greatest effort' was devoted to directing his imaginative energies, to channeling 'this outpouring of oneself.'"
  
  Laura Morowitz, an art history professor: "Exactly where Moreau fits in, and his real place in art history, is as difficult to determine in 1999, however, as it was in 1899."

Interests

• Italian Renaissance

• Artists

  Vittore Carpaccio, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo

Connections

Gustave Moreau probably had romatic relationships with his life model, Adelaide-Alexandrine Dureux, which had likely continued for 25 years.

Father:

Louis-Jean Marie Moreau

(born probably between 1761 and 1821)

Mother:

Adele Pauline Moreau

(née Desmoutier; born probably between 1761 and 1821)

Adele Pauline Moreau was a daughter of the mayor of Douai, France.

life partner:

Adelaide-Alexandrine Dureux

(born probably between 1796 and 1856)

mentor:

Théodore Chassériau

(20 September 1819 – 8 October 1856)

Chassériau was a French painter. Early in his career, he created his historical and religious paintings, portraits, murals and Orientalist images in Neoclassical style. Later, he shifted to Romanticism.

Chassériau also worked as a draftsman and produced a series of prints to illustrate Shakespeare's Othello.

teacher:

François-Edouard Picot

(10 October 1786 – 15 March 1868)

Picot was a French painter who worked during the July Monarchy. His pictures depicts primarily mythological, religious and historical topics.

Friend:

Edgar Degas

(19 July 1834 – 27 September 1917)

Degas was a French artist who represented Impressionism. The main characters of his pastel drawings and oil paintings are female ballet dancers.

pupil:

Georges Rouault

(27 May 1871 – 13 February 1958)

Rouault was a French artist and printmaker who represented Fauvism and Expressionism. His works inspired by the art of French medieval masters, depicted clowns, circus performers and religious persons successfully uniting spiritual and secular motifs.

pupil:

Henri Matisse

(31 December 1869 – 3 November 1954)

Matisse was one of the greatest French painters of the 20th century. One of the leaders of Fauvism along with André Derain, he painted primarily still lifes and nudes distinctive by the expressive use of colors.

pupil:

Albert Marquet

(27 March 1875 – 14 June 1947)

Marquet was a French painter and printmaker associated with the Fauvist movement. He was known for his subtly colored depictions of landscapes from a window vantage point.

pupil:

Henri Manguin

(original name Henri Charles Manguin; 23 March 1874 – 25 September 1949)

Manguin was a French painter who represented Fauvism. His art was strongly influenced by Impressionism as well.

pupil:

Edgar Maxence

(1871–1954)

Maxence was a French painter who represented Symbolism.

References

• Gustave Moreau As a painter of the fantastic, Moreau was much admired by the Surrealists as a forerunner of their movement, a relationship which art historian Jean Selz examines through a close analysis of Moreau's paintings.
  1988
• Gustave Moreau: History Painting, Spirituality, and Symbolism In this thought-provoking book, Peter Cooke explains how Moreau essentially created pictorial Symbolism through his novel approach to the genre of history painting. In the process, the author closely examines the artist through some of his major paintings, his ideology and aesthetic, and, for the first time, in relation to other artists of his time and of the previous generations.
  2014
• Gustav Moreau: Between Epic and Dream The volume reproduces and describes in detail more than 200 of Moreau's works, ranging from such well-known paintings as Orpheus and The Apparition (one of his many treatments of Salome and the beheaded John the Baptist) to lesser known but revealing watercolors, drawings, and sculptures.
  1999