Gustave Moreau

Gustave Moreau painted dreamlike scenes from myth and the Bible, crowded with jewelled detail, fantastic architecture and figures who seem frozen in a trance. He is one of the key figures of French Symbolism, and his rich, encrusted colour looks forward to modern art.

Born in Paris, he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and spent two years in Italy copying Renaissance masters. Oedipus and the Sphinx (1864), now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, made his name, and his Salome paintings of 1876 became famous. In the 1890s he taught at the École des Beaux-Arts, where his students included Henri Matisse and Georges Rouault, whom he encouraged to find their own way. He left his house and studio, with thousands of works, to the French state, and it opened in 1903 as the Musée Gustave Moreau in Paris.

Jupiter and Semele and Hercules and the Lernaean Hydra show his taste for glittering detail and heroic, mysterious drama.