Short answers, pulled from the story.
Gustave Moreau was a French painter born on the 6th of April 1826 and a central figure in the Symbolist movement. Art historian Jean Cassou called him "the Symbolist painter par excellence." He was also recognized as a significant forerunner of Symbolism in the visual arts from the 1860s onward.
Moreau produced over 15,000 paintings, watercolors, and drawings during his lifetime. At the time of his death in 1898, he still personally owned roughly 1,200 paintings and watercolors and more than 10,000 drawings, all of which he bequeathed to the French state.
About 125 students passed through Moreau's atelier at the École des Beaux-Arts between 1891 and 1898. Among them were Henri Matisse, Georges Rouault, Albert Marquet, Henri Manguin, and Charles Camoin, several of whom went on to found the Fauvist movement.
The Musée national Gustave Moreau is located at 14 rue de la Rochefoucauld in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. It opened to the public on the 14th of January 1903 in the townhome where Moreau lived and worked for most of his life, with his former student Georges Rouault as the first curator.
Breton wrote in 1961 that his discovery of the Musée Gustave Moreau when he was sixteen shaped his tastes for life. In his Manifesto of Surrealism, Breton listed Moreau alongside Picasso and de Chirico as artists who could pass for Surrealist. Salvador Dalí was also a regular visitor to the museum and publicly credited Moreau's influence.
Oedipus and the Sphinx, shown at the Paris Salon of 1864, won a medal and established Moreau's reputation. The painting drew on his study of Vittore Carpaccio, Mantegna, and Giovanni Bellini during his time in Italy and is now in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.