Works by Gustave Moreau

Gustave Moreau painted gods, heroes and heroines from myth and the Bible on surfaces crowded with jewels, flowers and carved stone, and left his Paris house and its thousands of works to the state as a museum.

Oedipus and the Sphinx made his name at the Salon of 1864, where it won a medal. The winged sphinx clings to the young man's chest and the two lock eyes while he grips a spear; a hand and a foot poke in at the bottom edge. Its hard outlines and close modelling show how carefully he had studied Vittore Carpaccio, Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini, and in Venice in 1858 he had copied Carpaccio's work.

After harsh reviews in 1869 he kept away from the Salon until 1876, when his Salome brought in a more painterly manner. The Apparition, a watercolour of that year, has a dancer in a jewelled costume point at a severed head that hangs in the air, ringed with light and dripping blood. In Jupiter and Semele, of 1895, the enthroned god has a red burst of rays behind his head, the pale Semele lies collapsed across his knee, and the columns on either side are thick with flowers and carved figures.

From 1891 he taught at the École des Beaux-Arts, where Henri Matisse, Georges Rouault and Albert Marquet were among his pupils; he pressed none of his own style on them and took them to copy in the Louvre. Myth and scripture account for most of the works below, chiefly paintings with some drawings, and many belong to the museum in his old house.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, collection du musée Gustave-Moreau, Musée d'Orsay, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.