THE MOREAU MUSEUM
Out of the beaten track of sight-seers, and not noticed with particular favour by the guide-books, the museum founded by Gustave Moreau at 14 Rue de la Rochefoucauld in Paris, is known only to a comparatively few artists and amateurs. You seldom hear Americans speak of this rare collection, it is never written about in the magazines. In September, 1897, Moreau made a will leaving his house and its contents to the State. He died in 1898 (not in 1902, as Bryan's dictionary has it), and in 1902 President Loubet authorised the Minister of Public Instruction to accept this rich legacy in the name of the republic. The artist was not known to stranger countries; indeed he was little known to his fellow-countrymen. Huysmans had cried him up in a revolutionary article; but to be praised by Huysmans was not always a certificate of fame. That critic was more successful in attracting public attention to Degas and Rops; and Moreau, a born eclectic, though without any intention of carrying water on both shoulders, was regarded suspiciously by his associates at the Beaux-Arts, while the new men he praised, Courbet, Manet, Whistler, Monet, would hold no commerce with him. To this day opinion is divided as to his merits, he being called a pasticheur or else a great painter-poet. Huysmans saw straight into the heart of the enigma—Gustave Moreau is poet and painter, a highly endowed man who had the pictorial vision in an unusual degree; whose brush responded to the ardent brain that directed it, the skilled hand that manipulated it; always responded, we say, except in the creation of life. His paintings are, strictly speaking, magnificent still-life. No vital current animates their airless, gorgeous, and sometimes cadaverous surfaces.
Like his friend Gustave Flaubert, with whom he had so much in common (at least on the Salammbô side of that writer), Moreau was born to affluence. His father was a government architect; he went early to the Êcole des Beaux-Arts, and also studied under Picot. In 1852 he had a Pietà in the Salon (he was born April 6,1826), and followed it the next season with a Darius and a large canvas depicting an episode from the Song of Songs. The latter was purchased for the Dijon Museum. At the Universal Exhibition of 1855 he showed a monster work, The Athenians and the Minotaur. He withdrew from the public until 1864, when his Oedipus and the Sphinx set Paris talking. He exhibited until 1880 various canvases illustrative of his studies in classic literatures and received sundry medals. He was elected a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1888, replacing Boulanger. He was decorated in 1875 with the Legion of Honour and made officier in 1883. When a member of the Institute he had few friends, and as professor at the Beaux-Arts he disturbed the authorities by his warm praise of the Primitives. Altogether a career meagre in exciting incident, though singularly rich and significant on the intimate side.
A first visit to the museum proved startling. We had seen and admired the fifteen water-colours at the Luxembourg, among them the famous Apparition, but for the enormous number of pictures, oil, water-colour, pastels, drawings, cartons, studies, we were unprepared. The bulky catalogue registers 1,132 pieces, and remember that while there are some unfinished canvases the amount of work executed—it is true during half a century—is nevertheless a testimony to Moreau's muscular and nervous energy, poetic conception, and intensity of concentration. Even his unfinished pictures are carried to a state of elaboration that would madden many modern improvisers in colour. Apart from sheer execution, there is a multitude of visions that must have been struggled for as Jacob wrestled with the Angel, for Moreau's was not a facile mind. He brooded over his dreams, he saw them before he gave them shape. He was familiar with all the Asiatic mythologies, and for him the pantheon of Christian saints must have been bone of his bone. The Oriental fantasy, the Buddhistic ideas, the fluent knowledge of Persian, Indian, and Byzantine histories, customs, and costumes sets us to wondering if this artist wasn't too cultured ever to be spontaneous. He recalls Prester John and his composite faiths.
There was besides the profound artistic erudition another stumbling-block to simplicity of style and unity of conception. Moreau began by imitating both Delacroix and Ingres. Now, such a precedure is manifestly dangerous. Huysmans speaks with contempt of promiscuity in the admiration of art. You can't admire Manet and Bastien-Lepage—"le Grévin de cabaret, le Siraudin de banlieue," he names the gentle Bastien; nor ought you to admire Manet and Moreau, we may add. And Huysmans did precisely what he preached against. Moreau was a man of wide intellectual interests. Devoid of the creative energy that can eject an individual style at one jet, as a volcano casts forth a rock, he attempted to aid nature by the process of an exquisite selection. His taste was trained, his range wide—too wide, one is tempted to add; and thus by a conscious act of the will he originated an art that recalls an antique chryselephantine statue, a being rigid with precious gems, pasted with strange colours, something with mineral eyes without the breath of life—contemporary life—yet charged with its author's magnetism, bearing a charmed existence, that might come from a cold, black magic; monstrous, withal possessing a strange feverish beauty, as Flaubert's Salammbô is beautiful, in a remote, exotic way.
However, it is not fair to deny Moreau human sympathies. There are many of his paintings and drawings, notably the latter, that show him as possessing heart. His handling of his medium though heavy is never timid, and at times is masterly. Delacroix inspired many of his landscape backgrounds, as Ingres gave him the proportions of his female figures. You continually encounter variations of Ingres, the sweet, serene line, the tapering feet and hands. Some critics have discerned the toe forms of Perugino; but such mechanical measurements strain our notion of eclecticism. Certainly Moreau studied Bellini, Mantegna, and Da Vinci without ever attaining the freedom and distinction of any of them. His colour, too, is often hard and cold, though not in the sumptuous surfaces of his fabrics; there Venetian splendour is apparent. He can be fiery and insipid, metallic and morbid; his Orientalism is at times transposed from the work of his old friend the painter Chasseriau into the key of a brilliant, if pompous rhetoric.