Gustave Moreau

Moreau painted further works in the same vein but before long, critics had become negative and in his Salome dancing before Herod (Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles) he developed a more atmospheric less classical style, indebted to Rembrandt. The theme of Salome exploits the contemporary fascination with the femme fatale, more aggressively demonstrated in a watercolor of the Apparition (musée d’Orsay, Paris) where a vengeful Salome points to the severed head of the Baptist hovering before her. In his later Jupiter and Sémélé (musée National Gustave Moreau, Paris) the sheer density of jewel-like detail is overwhelming: like an objet d’art of the Renaissance or a pictorial kunstkamer; it is on the one hand a pictorial equivalent of the Decadent writing of Oscar Wilde and Huysmans, on the other, a foretaste of the gothic fantasies of Mervyn Peake or Tolkien. It has been interpreted as an allegory of regeneration by death, and most eloquently described by the artist as follows: “In  the midst of colossal aerial buildings with neither foundations nor rooftops, covered with teeming quivering vegetation, this sacred flora standing out against the dark blues of the starry vaults and the deserts of the sky, the god so often invoked appears in his still veiled splendor.”

In 1892 Moreau was appointed professor at the École des Beaux-Arts, where pupils included Rouault (1871–1958) and Matisse (1869–1954). He took a more open approach to teaching than usual, allowing students to go their own way.