Gustave Moreau Prints

About Gustave Moreau

Gustave Moreau was born in Paris in 1826, the son of an architect and a musician, and was given a classical education in Greek and Latin alongside his drawing. He entered François-Édouard Picot's studio in 1844 and the École des Beaux-Arts in 1846, but left after failing to reach the final rounds of the Prix de Rome. In the early 1850s he became a close friend of Théodore Chassériau, and after Chassériau's death in 1856 he spent two years in Italy, copying the old masters in Rome, Venice and Florence and befriending the young Edgar Degas. Oedipus and the Sphinx made his name at the Salon of 1864 and won a medal. Harsh reviews in 1869 kept him away from the Salon until 1876, when he showed The Apparition and Hercules and the Lernaean Hydra, and he stopped exhibiting there altogether after 1880. In 1891 he took over a teaching studio at the École des Beaux-Arts, where his pupils included Henri Matisse and Georges Rouault. He died in 1898 and left his house and studio on the rue de La Rochefoucauld, with nearly 1,200 paintings and watercolours and more than 10,000 drawings, to the French State; it opened as the Musée Gustave Moreau in 1903. His pictures are crowded with jewels, embroidered fabrics and carved ornament, yet the figures within them stand strangely still, so a painting reads first as a glowing surface of gold and deep colour and only slowly as a story.