Gustave Moreau

Gustave Moreau was born on 6 April 1826 in Paris. He was educated at the College Rollin as a boarder from 1837 to 1840, and completed his classical schooling privately thereafter. He entered the atelier of Francois-Edouard Picot at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1846, and left in 1849, after two unsuccessful attempts at the Prix de Rome, without a formal degree.

Moreau built his early reputation at the Paris Salon. His painting Oedipus and the Sphinx caused a sensation at the Salon of 1864, establishing his name; Prometheus followed in 1869, again drawing attention despite harsh press criticism. The Apparition, shown at the Salon of 1876, further won over public and critical opinion, and he exhibited Oedipus and the Sphinx again at the 1878 Exposition Universelle, by which point he was regarded as an essential representative of French Symbolism. In 1881 a series of watercolors illustrating La Fontaine's Fables was shown at the Cercle des Aquarellistes in Paris; critics judged his contribution far superior to the others, and he alone was commissioned to continue the series. After 1880 he largely withdrew from submitting to the Salon.

Moreau received the Legion d'Honneur as Chevalier in 1875 and as Officier in 1883, was elected to the Academie des Beaux-Arts in 1888, and was appointed professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1892, where his students included Henri Matisse, Albert Marquet, and Georges Rouault. After about a year of declining health, he died of stomach cancer on 18 April 1898 in Paris, and was buried at the Cimetiere de Montmartre in his parents' tomb. He bequeathed his house and its contents, roughly 8,000 paintings, watercolors, cartoons, and drawings, to the French state; the collection opened to the public in 1903 as the Musee Gustave Moreau, now the primary repository of his work.

Moreau's reputation shifted markedly over his lifetime, from Salon acclaim in 1864 and 1869 to sustained press hostility in the 1870s, and back to acclaim by the time of the 1876 Apparition and the 1878 Exposition Universelle, after which he was widely regarded as central to French Symbolism. His decision to largely withdraw from the Salon after 1880 and to teach rather than exhibit shaped his late-career image as a private, visionary painter, a reading reinforced by his own museum. Modern institutional assessment has remained positive: the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago organized a joint retrospective, Gustave Moreau: Between Epic and Dream, in 1998 to 1999. No verbatim contemporary review from a named nineteenth-century critic, and no confirmed direct quotation from the organizing museums, could be verified for this profile, so none is quoted.

Moreau's market is thin and dominated by historical rather than recent transactions, consistent with an artist whose major holdings sit permanently in museums. The highest confirmed auction price is USD 2,750,000 for Le Poete et la Sirene, sold at Sotheby's New York on 24 October 1989. No sale surpassing that figure could be confirmed as of this writing, though the record is decades old and buyers should treat it as a floor for research rather than a current benchmark. His works appear at auction infrequently and are typically consigned by dealers or estates rather than moving through an active primary market, since there is no commercial gallery representing his estate.

Because the great majority of Moreau's output, roughly 8,000 works, sits in the Musee Gustave Moreau under French state stewardship, the pool of material available to private collectors is genuinely small, and auction activity is correspondingly sparse. No catalogue raisonne has been confirmed; the Musee Gustave Moreau functions as the de facto authority for attribution and provenance questions, so collectors should weight documented ties to that collection or to other named public holdings heavily when evaluating a work. The 1989 auction record, while the highest confirmed figure, is old enough that it should be treated as a historical data point rather than a live indicator of current demand.