Gustave Moreau

Gustave Moreau was born in Paris in 1826 and grew up with an architect father and a musician mother. He entered the École des Beaux-Arts in 1846 and was influenced by Romantic painters such as Chassériau. From 1857 he studied in Italy for about two years, copying works by Titian, Leonardo, and Michelangelo.

His Oedipus and the Sphinx, shown at the Salon of 1864, won attention and established his reputation. His works, which drew mainly on the Bible and Greek mythology and depicted a world of imagination and fantasy, had a great influence on painters and writers at the end of the 19th century, and he is regarded as a forerunner of Symbolism.

He became a member of the Academy of Fine Arts in 1888 and a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1892. His teaching respected the individuality of his pupils, and Matisse and Rouault were among those who emerged from it. In his later years he shut himself away in his Paris house and continued to work, and he died in 1898.