In A World Of Pure Imagination

More than a century after they were last exhibited, Gustave Moreau’s The Fables remain timeless and glittering visions of a jewelled neverland, finds Matthew Dennison

-  Matthew Dennison

AMERE reaction against the modern world’ was the dismissal leveled by Émile Zola, 19th-century realist writer and naturalist proselyte, at his contemporary and countryman Gustave Moreau (1826–98). Yet Moreau’s art—categorized as symbolist on account of its apparently escapist retreat into imaginative fantasy—frequently engaged with concerns that both he and Zola would have considered all too ‘modern’, including relations between the sexes and the fine dividing line between conscious and unconscious desire.

On the surface, Moreau’s luscious visions of a jeweled neverland suggest deliberate historicism, his subject matter drawn from Bible stories, mythology and legend. Probe a little deeper and more timely subtexts emerge. In 1878, Moreau exhibited at Paris’s Exposition Universelle. Although the paintings he showed depicted Biblical scenes, all were allegories of French renewal, following recent humiliations in the Franco-Prussian War.

Zola notwithstanding, Moreau enjoyed considerable renown during his lifetime. He became an instant sensation in 1864, following the exhibition at the Paris Salon of his grandiose rendering of a scene from Greek mythology, Oedipus and the Sphinx. In both Paris and London in the 1880s, a chorus of praise greeted the series of small watercolor images, of which the residue—more than 30 paintings—is currently on display at Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire.