His “Orpheus” is one of his most characteristic and beautiful works. He has not borrowed the composition from antique tragedy. The drama is over. Orpheus has been torn asunder by the Mænads, and the limbs of the poet lie scattered over the icy fields of the hyperborean lands. His head, borne upon his lyre now for ever mute, has been cast upon the shore of Erebus. Nature seems to sleep in mysterious peace. Around there is nothing to be seen but still waters and pallid light, nothing to be heard but the tone of a small shrill flute, played by a barbarian shepherd sitting on the cliff. A Thracian girl, whose hair is adorned with a garland, and whose look is earnest, has taken up the head of the singer and regards it long and quietly. Is it merely pity that is in her eyes? A romantic Hellenism, a profound melancholy underlies the picture, and the old story closes with a cry of love. In his “Œdipus and the Sphinx” of 1864, and his “Heracles” of 1878, he treated battle scenes, the heroic struggle between man and beast, and in these pictures, also, there is no violence, no vehemence, no movement. In a terrible silence the two antagonists exchange looks in his “Œdipus and the Sphinx,” while their breath mingles. Like a living riddle, the winged creature gazes upon the stranger, but the youth with his long locks stands so composedly before her that the spectator feels that he must know the decisive word.

In “Helen upon the Walls of Troy” the figure of the enchantress, as she stands there motionless, clad in a robe glittering with brilliant stones and diamonds like a shrine, is seen to rise against the blood-red horizon as though it were a statue of gold and ivory. Like a queen of spades, she holds in her hand a large flower. Heaps of bodies pierced with arrows lie at her feet. But she has no glance of pity for the dying whose death-rattle greets her. Her wide, apathetic eyes are fixed upon vacancy. She sees in the gold of the sunset the smoke ascending from the Grecian camp. She will embark in the fair ship of Menelaus, and return in triumph to Hellas, where new love shall be her portion. And the looks of the old men fasten upon her in admiration. “It is fitting that the Trojans and the Achæans fight for such a woman.” Helen in her blond voluptuous beauty is transformed beneath the hands of Moreau into Destiny stalking over ground saturated with blood, into the Divinity of Mischief—a divinity that, without knowing it, poisons everything that comes near her, or that she sees or touches.

Baschet.Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
MOREAU.THE YOUNG MAN AND DEATH.MOREAU.ORPHEUS.

In his “Galatea” Moreau’s love of jewels and enamel finds its highest triumph. Galatea’s grotto is one large, glittering casket. Flowers made from the sun, and leaves from the stars, and branches of coral stretch forth their boughs and open their cups. And as the most brilliant jewel of all, there rests in the holy of holies the radiant form of the sleeping Galatea, a kind of Greek Susanna, watched by the staring, adamantine eye of Polyphemus.

And just as he bathes these Grecian forms in the dusk of a profound romantic melancholy, so in Moreau’s pictures the figures of the Bible are tinged with a shade of Indian Buddhism, a pantheistic mysticism which places them in a strange modern light. In his “David” he represents in a quiet and peaceful way the entry of a human soul into Nirvana. The aged king sits dreaming upon his gorgeous throne, and an angel watches in shining beauty beside this phantom, the flame of whose life is slowly sinking. A curious light falls upon him from the sky. The light of the evening horizon shines faint between the pillars, and the spectator feels that it is the end of a long day. His pictures of 1878 dealing with Salome, in their strange sentiment—suggestive of an opium vision—are like a paraphrase of Heine’s poem in Atta Troll. In a sombre hall supported by mighty pillars, through which coloured lamps and stupefying pastil-burners shed a blue and red light, sits Herod the king, half asleep with hasheesh, wrapped in silk, and motionless as a Hindu idol. His face is pale and gloomy, and his throne is like a crystal confessional chair, fashioned with all the riches of the world. Two women lean at the foot of a pillar. One of them touches the strings of a lute, and a small panther yawns near a vessel of incense. Upon the floor of variegated mosaics flowers lie strewn. Salome advances. Tripping upon her toes as lightly as a figure in a dream, she begins to dance, holding a tremulous lotus-flower in her hand. A shining tiara is upon her head; her body is adorned with all the jewels which the dragons guard in the veins of the earth. Faster and faster and with a more voluptuous grace she twists and stretches her splendid limbs; but of a sudden she starts and presses her hand to her heart: she has seen the executioner as he smote the head of John from the body.—In the midst of an Oriental paradise, the body of the Baptist lies in the grass; the head has been set upon a charger, and Salome, like a bloodthirsty tigress, watches it with looks of ardent, famished love.

Different as they seem in technique, there are many points of contact between the visionary Gustave Moreau and Puvis de Chavannes, the original and fascinating creator of the decorative painting of the nineteenth century. Where one indulges in detail, the other resorts to simplification; where the former is opulent the latter is ascetic; and yet they are associated through inward sympathy.

Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
MOREAU.DESIGN FOR ENAMEL.MOREAU.THE PLAINT OF THE POET.

Puvis de Chavannes is the Domenico Ghirlandajo of the nineteenth century. The most eminent mural works which have been achieved in France owe their existence to him. Wall-paintings from his hand may be found above the staircase of the museums of Amiens, Marseilles, and Lyons, in the Paris Panthéon and the new Sorbonne, in the town-halls of Poitiers and many other French towns—pictures which it is difficult to describe in detail, through the medium of pedestrian prose. The two works with which he opened the decorative series in the museum of Amiens in 1861 are entitled “Bellum” and “Concordia.” In the former warriors are riding over a monotonous plain. Two smoking pillars, the gloomy witnesses to sorrow and devastation, cast their dark shadows over the still fields, whilst here and there burning mills rise into the sombre sky like torches. In “Concordia,” the counterpart to this work, there are women plucking flowers, and naked youths urging on their horses amid a luxuriant grove of laurel. In the Paris Panthéon he painted, between 1876 and 1878, “The Girlhood of St. Geneviève.” A laughing spring landscape, filled with the blitheness of May, spreads beneath the bright sky of the Isle de France. Calm figures move in it, men and women, children and greybeards. A bishop lays his hand upon the head of a young shepherdess; sailors are coming ashore from their barks. “The Grove sacred to the Arts and Muses” comes first in the decoration of the Lyons Museum. Upon one side is a thick forest, dark and profound, and upon the other the horizon is fringed by violet-blue hills and a large lake reflecting the bluish atmosphere; in the foreground are green meadows, where the flowers gleam like stars, and trees standing apart, oaks and firs, their strong, straight stems rising stiffly into the sky. At the foot of a pillared porch strange figures lie by the shore or stand erect amid the pale grass, one with her arm pointing upwards, another musing with her hand resting upon her chin, a third unrolling a parchment. Athletic youths are bringing flowers and winding garlands. The “Vision of Antiquity” and “Christian Inspiration” complete the series. The former of these pictures brings the spectator into Attica. Locked by a simple landscape of hills the blue sea is rippling, and bright islands rise from its bosom, while a clear sky sheds its full light from above. Trees and shrubs are growing here and there. A shepherd is playing upon the pan-pipes, goats are grazing, and five female figures, some of them nude, the others clothed, caress tame peacocks in the tall grass or lean against a parapet, breathing in the fresh, cool air. Farther back, at the foot of a height, is a young woman, holding herself erect like a statue, as she talks with a youth, whilst in the distance at the verge of the sea a spectral cavalcade, like that in Phidias’ frieze of the Parthenon, gallops swiftly by. In the counterpart, “Christian Inspiration,” a number of friars who are devoted to art are gathered together in the portico of an abbey church. The walls are embellished with naïve frescoes in the style of the Siennese school. One of the monks who is working on the pictures has alighted from the ladder and regards the result of his toil with a critical air. Lilies are blooming in a vase upon the ground. Outside, beyond the cloister wall, the flush of evening sheds its parting light over a lonely landscape, whence dark cypresses rise into the air, straight as a lance. In the decoration of the Sorbonne the object was to suggest all the lofty purposes to which the place has been dedicated upon the wall of the great amphitheatre used for the solemn sessions of the faculty, and facing the statues of the founders. Puvis de Chavannes did this by displaying a throne in a sacred grove, a throne upon which a grave matron arrayed in sombre garments is sitting in meditation. This is the old Sorbonne. Two genii at her side bring palm-branches and crowns as offerings in honour of the famous minds of the past. Around are standing manifold figures arrayed in the costumes which were assigned to the arts and sciences in Florence at the time of Botticelli and Filippino Lippi. From the rock upon which they are set there bursts the living spring from which youth derives knowledge and new power. A thick wood divides this quiet haunt, consecrated to the Muses, from the rush and the petty trifles of life. In a painting entitled “Inter Artes et Naturam,” over the staircase of the museum of Rouen, artists musing over the ruins of mediæval buildings are seen lying in the midst of a Norman landscape, beneath apple-trees whose branches are weighed down by their burden of fruit; upon the other side of the picture there is a woman holding a child upon her knees, whilst another woman is trying to reach a bough laden with fruit, and a group of painters look on enchanted with the grace of her simple, harmonious movement.

Puvis de Chavannes is not a virtuoso in technique; for a Frenchman, indeed, he is almost clumsy, and is sure in very little of the work of his hand,—in fact, it is quite possible that a later age will not reckon him among the great painters. But what it can never forget is that after a period of lengthy aberrations he restored decorative art in general to its proper vocation.

L’Art.Graphische Künste.
MOREAU.THE APPARITION.PIERRE PUVIS DE CHAVANNES.