Gustave Moreau’s visionary works speak to an obsession with the otherworldly, the macabre, and the life of the imagination, making him one of the most fascinating of nineteenth century artists. Guided partly by his unusual religious faith, called Neo-Platonist, stressing the imperfection and impermanence of the physical world, Moreau captured the products of his imagination on canvas with photographic accuracy. He believed that by so doing, he was allowing divine vision to speak through his brush. In Moreau’s art, moments depicted from biblical or mythic narratives are populated with ambiguous visual symbols, with divine and mortal beings locked in conflict, and with strange visions of sex and suffering.

In an era when paintings of mythological subjects often meant sentimentalized renderings or cold recitations of classical sculpture, Moreau was a pioneer with his intensely personal, fantastic, even perverse, interpretations. His works from the 1860s anticipate the Symbolist work of the 1880s, exploring interior consciousness rather than exterior observation. A solitary, wealthy intellectual, Moreau spent most of his life in Paris. His home in Paris’s Montmartre is now a national museum, where most of the preparatory drawings are kept.

Moreau, keen on guarding his reputation as a history painter, did not want to be perceived as a catholic painter.[1] Although he painted many pious subjects, often including female saints, he did keep these intimate pictures throughout his career in his studio, now the Musée Gustave Moreau, sometimes he placed these small works with friends and admirers. The pietà perhaps embodied Moreau’s widening of emotional horizons most and show his expansion of feelings. Perhaps his own complicated relation with his mother, with whom he lived together until her death in 1890, reveals his attraction to a mother’s innate affection for her child. Moreau first contribution to the Salon of 1852 was a large Pietà, commissioned by the French state. Although the now lost painting hung prominently, it was barely noticed by the critics. He would never show another Pietà at a Salon and continue to produce variations of this throughout the 1860s. Moreau’s private pietas and entombments can be found in museums throughout the world such as the Louvre, Paris, National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, Städel Museum Frankfurt. In the present watercolor, Moreau conveys his imagination of romantic pain by means of bold expressive colors.

[1] Louisa Capodieci, Gustave Moreau. Les aquarelles, Paris 1998, pp. 96-97