House museums #30: Musée Gustave Moreau

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In 1862 the painter Gustave Moreau, then aged 36, wrote at the bottom of a sketch that he was thinking about what might happen to his paintings after his death. “Separated they would perish,” he wrote, “but taken together they give some idea of what sort of artist I was and the world I liked to dream in.”

Moreau would live another 36 years but the idea of keeping the bulk of his work together stuck with him as he grew to become one of the most feted Symbolist painters. His technical assurance, drawn from close study of the Italian masters, combined with the chimerical, almost delirious quality of his hyper-detailed treatment of mythical and biblical subjects, chimed with public taste in the second half of the century. He won medals in the official salons and expositions in the US, UK and France and sold more than 400 works, mostly to private collectors.

Moreau worked in his parents’ Paris town house in the 9th arrondissement, 15 minutes’ walk from the Opéra. After his mother’s death in 1884 he mothballed her suite of rooms on the first floor. In 1895, he had the house extended outwards and upwards to provide two massive exhibition spaces on the upper floors.

The painter died in 1898, leaving the house and around 15,000 of his canvases and drawings to the French state, with the instruction they be kept together and exhibited according to his plans. The museum opened in 1903 and in the following decades, when Symbolism had fallen out of vogue, the authorities must have wondered if they had been landed with the upkeep of a white elephant.

His rehabilitation started with the Surrealists, who appreciated the fantastic qualities of his work. Salvador Dalí and André Breton were fans; the latter lobbied for the first major Moreau retrospective at the Louvre in 1961. Since then, interest in his work has grown, as have annual visitor numbers, rising to around 40,000 in the years before Covid lockdowns.

The house’s highlight is the two great double-height galleries joined by a spiral stair that drops from the top storey like a curl of orange peel. In his final years, Moreau reworked and enlarged existing paintings to fit the new space. It’s an unusual example of the prospect of the museum influencing the work it would exhibit.

Successive restorations have opened the rest of the house, including the reception room, where he would entertain students including future stars Henri Matisse and George Rouault during his late-career tenure as professor at the École des Beaux-Arts.

Moreau’s parents’ first-floor apartment, with its stuffed birds and gilded Second Empire furniture, offers a time capsule — though carefully curated by the painter — of mid-19th century middle-class Parisian affluence. The ground floor, restored in 2015 after almost 100 years of dilapidation, shows more studies, sketches and watercolours.

What unites almost all the rooms, large and small, is that their walls are crammed with pictures, three or four deep, their frames almost touching, in the more-is-more manner specified by Moreau in his will. The museum is perhaps the best of all his works.

musee-moreau.fr

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