Moreau Museum

This museum, which opened its doors in 1903, houses his 6000 oil paintings, drawings and watercolors. This house has attracted Andre Breton and the Surrealists in the period between the two World Wars.

The Collection

Influenced by the English Pre-Raphaelitites, Moreau created jewel-encrusted fantasies of a mythological world or the sombre splendour of Byzantium. His work had a poetic melancholy, like Puvis de Chavannes and Odilon Redon’s ones. The “femme fatale” is a permanent source of inspiration for Moreau depicting her under a variety of characters: virgin, sphinx, vampire, harpy and siren she appears as The Lady with the Unicorn, Salome, Helen, Delila, a Chimera, Semele, Eve, or Leda. It was in 1888, Huysmans’ publication of L’Art Moderne described Moreau’s attraction for a generation of Symbolists: ‘Gustave Moreau is unique. He is a mystic, isolated in the heart of Paris in a cell where no noise of contemporary life enters the portals. Abandoned to ecstasy, he sees the enchanted visions and bleeding apotheoses of other ages. His paintings do not seem to belong to painting norm one feels, in front of these paintings, the same sensations as one feels reading a strange and captivating poem, like Baudelaire’s Dream.

Hidden in the 9th arrondisement, the Musee Moreau, which was the residence of the Symbolist painter Moreau and converted into a museum following his death in 1895.