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PROPERTY FROM A SWISS PRIVATE COLLECTION

REÎTRE ET CAPTIVES

31.5 by 21.3cm., 12 1/2 by 8 1/2 in.

signed Gustave Moreau l.l.

watercolour and gouache on paper

PROVENANCE

Désiré Marchand, by 1906 (His sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 2-3 February 1914, lot 26)
M. Delamarre (purchased at the above sale)
Private collection, Switzerland (since circa 1930)

LITERATURE

Pierre-Louis Mathieu, Gustave Moreau, sa vie, son oeuvre, Paris, 1976, p. 320, no. 181, catalogued and illustrated
Pierre-Louis Mathieu, Gustave Moreau. Monographie et nouveau catalogue de l'oeuvre achevé, Paris-Courbevoie, 1998, p. 341, no. 212, catalogued and illustrated

NOTE

Executed circa 1878-80.

Inspired by the medieval history of Venice, the city's lion-emblazoned standard flying in the background, the exact subject of Reître et captives is open to interpretation. Quite possibly it refers to Venice's long-standing war with Genoa, which resulted in four battles between the mid thirteenth and mid fourteenth centuries. The armoured rider, sporting St George's Cross, the symbol of Genoa, could be a Genoese knight, the girls by his side his Venetian captives. As early as 1851, the young Moreau had painted Rape of the Venetians by Cypriot Pirates (Hôtel de Ville, Vichy; Mathieu, 1998, no. 10). However, the captives' exotic costumes could be Levantine, suggesting that the rider is a victorious returning Crusader, the girls his trophies from his campaigns in the Holy Land.

Moreau worked up his watercolour from several preparatory drawings now in the Musée Gustave Moreau (Paul Bittler and Pierre-Louis Mathieu, Catalogue des dessins de Gustave Moreau, Paris, 1983, nos. 618, 908, 964, 2002). Inscribed and dated Le Reître - Les captives 1851, one of these, no. 618 in Bittler and Mathieu, reveals not only that the title is Moreau's own, but that, as was often the case with his watercolours, he had conceived the composition long before executing it as a finished work. The present work can be dated to 1878-80 by the style of the signature, and by its similarities to other watercolours from the period depicting Renaissance cavaliers (Mathieu, 1998, nos. 209-211).

Reître et captives encapsulates the qualities that distinguish Moreau as one of the greatest watercolourists of the nineteenth century: jewel-like colours akin to cloisonné enamel, delicacy of execution, and minute detail. As critic Charles Blanc wrote of Moreau's watercolours: 'One would have to coin a word for the occasion if one wished to characterise the talent of Gustave Moreau, the word colourism for example, which would well convey all that is excessive, superb and prodigious in his love of colour. It is as if one were in the presence of an illuminant artist who had been a jeweller before becoming a painter and who, having yielded to the intoxication of colour, had ground rubies, sapphires, emeralds, topazes, opals, pearls and mother of pearl to make up his palette.' (Charles Blanc, Le Temps, 15 May 1881).

We are grateful to Pierre-Louis Mathieu for his assistance in the cataloguing of this work.