Moreau, Gustave

(1826-1898)

   painter

   Born in Paris, where he studied art, Gustave Moreau traveled to Italy (1857-59), where he produced a number of works based on the paintings of Michelangelo, carpaccio, Mantegna, and Gozzoli. He received notoriety at the Salon of 1869 with Œdipus and the Sphinx (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York city), a painting with a strangely decadent quality. Moreau's esthetic, both refined and sensual, is in contrast to both realism and impressionism. He was admired by the Parnassian poets and the symbolists, and by joris-karl huysmans and marcel proust. Influenced by Persian and indian miniatures, and by medieval enamels, he filled his allegorical and mythological subjects with a personal and obscure symbolism, understandable only because of the clarification that he gave in his writings. Professor at the École des beaux-arts after 1892, he had among his students a number, including Henri matisse, who would later become fauvist. Moreau's home in Paris, now transformed into a museum (Musée national Gustave Moreau), contains more than 200 of his paintings and watercol-ors (including Apparition, 1876, a dazzling scene from the legend of Salome, a recurrent theme in his work), and more than 7,000 of his drawings.