Gustave Moreau

• 1. A Boy Who Drew Incessantly

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  Gustave Moreau was born on the 6th of April 1826 in Paris into a cultured, upper-middle-class family. His father Louis Jean Marie Moreu worked as an architect while his mother Adèle Pauline Desmoutier was a musician. The family lived in Vesoul from 1827 to 1830 before returning to Paris where his father became a highway commissioner. As a child Moreau suffered from frail health but began drawing incessantly around the age of eight. He attended Collège Rollin starting in 1837 until his older sister died at thirteen in 1840. After her death he withdrew from school and lived a sheltered life with his parents who encouraged his artistic tendencies. His father insisted on a solid classical education so Moreau learned Greek Latin and read French and classical literature from his substantial library. He also learned piano and sang as a very good tenor. In 1841 he visited Italy with his mother and relatives filling a sixty-page album with drawings.

• 2. Italy And The Renaissance Masters

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  Moreau left Paris in October 1857 with his friend Frédéric Charlot de Courcy sailing from Marseille to Civitavecchia then Rome. He approached this period as extended study compensating for his premature withdrawal from the École des Beaux-Arts. For two months he spent seven or eight hours daily copying figures from the Sistine Chapel ceiling. He copied works by relatively obscure artists as often as established masters like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. He frequented the Villa Medici where he worked from live models establishing friendships with Elie Delaunay Henri Chapu Émile Lévy and Georges Bizet. He met a young Edgar Degas whom he mentored while in Italy. In August 1858 his parents joined him; his retired father studied architecture while Moreau developed a fascination with Vittore Carpaccio in Venice. They returned to Paris in September 1859 carrying several hundred drawings and paintings. During their time there the Second Italian War of Independence broke out making Naples and Pompeii tense places. Moreau produced only a few original works including large drawings on Hesiod and the Muse theme and fine watercolor landscapes painted en plein air.

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• 3. The Sphinx That Won A Medal

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  Oedipus and the Sphinx won a medal at the Paris Salon of 1864 revealing Moreau's close study of Vittore Carpaccio Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini. Its firm outlines and detailed modeling typified the works that brought him success with critics and the public for the remainder of the decade. The painting currently resides in the permanent collection at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. One commentator described Moreau's work as like a pastiche of Mantegna created by a German student who relaxes from painting by reading Schopenhauer. He quickly gained a reputation for eccentricity though he continued exhibiting through the 1860s gradually gaining a select group of enthusiastic admirers. Although Prometheus received a medal at the Salon of 1869 severe press criticisms followed so he did not submit paintings again until 1876. He permanently withdrew after 1880 having stopped exhibiting at the Salon years earlier. In the 1870s disturbed by criticism that his work had become formulaic he concentrated on renewing his art completing Salome Dancing before Herod in 1876 which announced a more painterly style characterizing his later works.

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• 4. The Teacher Who Made Rebels

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  Moreau reluctantly took over Élie Delaunay's studio at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in October 1891 accepting the appointment of professor and atelier director in January 1892 at age sixty-five. About 125 students passed through his studio including Henri Matisse Georges Rouault Pierre Marcel-Béronneau Simon Bussy Charles Camoin and Albert Marquet. Roger-Marx wrote in 1896 that fires of insurrection had been lit in the heart of the school with all rebels gathering under Moreau's shield. He made no attempt to impose his own views or style giving them stimulating atmosphere and intelligent encouragement to follow their ideas. Students were invited to his home on Sunday afternoons though never allowed into his studio. He took pupils to the Louvre to study masters an unheard-of practice at the École des Beaux-Arts. Matisse said it was almost revolutionary for him to show us the way to the Museum. As early as 1898 Matisse and Albert Marquet worked in what became known as the fauve manner exemplified by Fauve Nude painted in Moreau's atelier. Rouault held Moreau in highest esteem half a century later speaking of him with veneration and sympathy.

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• 5. A Hermit With A Secret Love

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  Moreau never married yet biographers recently revealed a relationship with Adelaide-Alexandrine Dureux lasting over thirty years. He met her soon after returning from Italy producing many drawings and watercolors of her plus romantic caricatures of walking on clouds together. He subsidized an apartment for her on Rue Notre-Dame de Lorette just blocks from his family townhome. His mother knew of the relationship and was fond of Alexandrine stipulating in her will that she receive an annuity if Gustave died before her. He designed her tombstone engraved with interlaced initials A and G near his family plot where he was buried. When his mother died at age eighty-two in 1884 he could not spend nights alone taking refuge at Alexandrine's apartment. The room where she died remained unchanged becoming a shrine he never entered. Six years later he stood at Alexandrine's bedside when she died on the 28th of March 1890 after five months of deteriorating health. He bought back several watercolors given to her over the years placing furniture from her heirs in a room of his townhome in memory. Both deaths reinforced his isolation burying him deeper into work which took on greater melancholic edge.

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• 6. The Museum That Became A Shrine

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  Moreau arrived at the idea of leaving his house to the state as a museum after about 1884 beginning an inventory of paintings. He remodeled his townhome in 1895 expanding his small studio into much larger exhibition space. After declining health for about a year he died of stomach cancer on the 18th of April 1898 buried at Cimetière de Montmartre in Paris within his parents' tomb. His instructions stipulated death not be announced in press with funeral being very small simple service and flowers placed only on Alexandrine Dureux's grave. The government hesitated accepting the estate since artist's house museums were rare then unprecedented in France. His assistant Henri Rupp organized the estate persuading the state to take it over. The Musée national Gustave Moreau opened to public on the 14th of January 1903 with former student Georges Rouault appointed curator. It remains by far the largest and most significant collection of his work containing nearly twelve hundred paintings watercolors and over ten thousand drawings.

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• 7. A Visionary For The Surrealists

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  André Breton famously haunted the museum regarding Moreau as precursor of Surrealism listing him among forerunners like Picasso and de Chirico in Manifesto of Surrealism. Breton wrote in 1961 that discovering the museum at sixteen shaped his likes and loves for rest of life finding revelation of beauty and love in certain women's faces and figures. Salvador Dalí was great admirer calling it twilight world where constellations of precious stones float like promises of archangelical redemption from gulf of erotic and scatological obsession. At the museum in 1970 Dalí chose to make public announcement of plans to open Teatro-Museo Dalí in Figueras Spain holding wax replica of own head on silver platter. Max Ernst used reproductions of Moreau's work occasionally creating collages. Breton sponsored exhibition of symbolist drawings in Paris at Dateau-Lavoir Gallery in 1958 succeeding in getting attention of right curators leading to exhibitions at Louvre Museum and Museum of Modern Art in 1961. By 1970s exhibitions and monographs appeared regularly re-establishing recognition of Moreau's work after decades of obscurity.

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