Gustave Moreau
1826–1898French · Symbolism 1880–1910
He painted jewelled mythological scenes that Huysmans made famous in a novel, then spent his last years teaching Matisse and Rouault to disregard everything he had done. He left his house and its fourteen thousand works to the state as a museum.
Formation
Trained in the academic tradition in Paris and spent two years in Italy copying — Mantegna, Carpaccio, the Renaissance masters — which supplied the archaeological detail his pictures are dense with. He exhibited at the Salon from the 1860s and had a substantial success, then withdrew from public exhibition for nearly twenty years and worked in private. In 1892 he became a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts, where he turned out to be an unusually liberal teacher.
Technique
Encrusted and jewel-like. Moreau built surfaces in dense layers of paint, glaze and impasto, sometimes scratching into the surface and applying paint with the palette knife to create an effect closer to enamel, mosaic or precious metalwork than to conventional oil painting. Many pictures were reworked over years and left unresolved. His watercolours and the extraordinary unfinished oil sketches — loose, abstract fields of colour with no subject at all — look nothing like the finished works and are what most interests modern viewers.
The palette
Deep, saturated and metallic. Lakes and vermilion, ultramarine, gold, viridian and emerald, applied in small intense areas so that the whole surface glitters rather than resolving into broad tonal masses. The intention is decorative and hieratic: colour as encrustation. In the unfinished works the same palette appears as pure floating colour without descriptive purpose, which is why they were later read as proto-abstract.
Legacy
Huysmans's À rebours made his Salome the emblem of Decadent taste and secured his fame beyond the art world. As a teacher he was decisive: he told students to look at the street and to follow their own temperament, and Matisse, Marquet and Rouault came out of his studio. The Musée Gustave Moreau, his own house, preserved the studio intact and is one of the strangest and most complete artist museums anywhere.
Further reading: Gustave Moreau: History Painting, Spirituality, and Symbolism — Peter CookePalette
The colours reconstructed for this artist, with the reasoning behind each.
Pigments used: Ultramarine · Cobalt blue · Lead-tin yellow · Ochre · Gold leaf · Vermilion · Madder and the red lakes · Sienna · Malachite · Emerald green · Viridian · Cobalt violet · Lead white · Zinc white