Waddesdon Manor: Gustave Moreau

 

Gustave Moreau (1826-98) was one of the most brilliant and influential artists associated with the French Symbolist movement. Gustave Moreau: The Fables at Waddesdon Manor aims to display some of the most important works he ever made, unseen in public for over a century.

In collaboration with Musée National Gustave Moreau, Paris, this exhibition reveals for the first time 35 watercolours created by Moreau between 1879 and 1885, on loan from a private collection. They were part of a series commissioned by the art collector Antony Roux to illustrate the 17th-century Fables of Jean de La Fontaine (many of which derive from Aesop’s Fables). They were exhibited in Paris in the 1880s to great acclaim and in London in 1886, where critics frequently compared the artist to Edward Burne-Jones.

Moreau made 64 works for the series, which subsequently entered a Rothschild collection; however, a significant proportion was lost during the Nazi era. The surviving works have not been exhibited since 1906 and they have only ever been published in black and white.

Joris-Karl Huysmans wrote that "Gustave Moreau is an extraordinary, unique artist ... a mystic, locked away in his Paris cell, where the buzz of contemporary life cannot reach him ... Lost in ecstasy, he sees splendid magical visions, the gory apotheoses of other ages." 

Read more about Moreau in my post describing a visit to the Gustave Moreau Museum in Paris.

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