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Artist or Maker: Gustave Moreau (French, 1826-1898)

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Description: Saint Sébastien et l'ange
signed 'Gustave Moreau'(lower left)
oil on canvas
31 1/2 x 16 in. (80 x 40.5 cm.)
Painted circa 1880-85.

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Provenance: Isidore Montaignac, Galerie d'art, Paris, 1886.
Humbert sale; Drouot, Paris, 20-21 June 1902, lot 80 (39,500 Fr.)
Collection Zarifi, Marseille.
Anon. sale, Sotheby's, 28 November 1979, lot 110.

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Published: P.-L. Mathieu, Gustave Moreau: Complete edition of the finished paintings, watercolours and drawings, Oxford, 1976, p. 324, no. 167 (illustrated).
P.-L. Mathieu, Monographie et nouveau catalogue de l'oeuvre achevé, Paris, 1998, p. 334, no. 193 (illustrated).

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Notes: At the Salon of 1876, Gustave Moreau exhibited Salomé (The Armand Hammer Collection, UCLA, Los Angeles) and l'Apparition (Paris, Musée du Louvre) [fig. 1]. He also showed two other academic male nude works; Hercules et l'hydre de Lerne (The Art Institute of Chicago) [fig. 2] and Saint Sébastien, (baptise martyr), (The Fogg Art Museum, Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts) [fig. 3].

It was the final painting of Saint Sebastian that impressed the critics and the public alike with its bright and luminous colours and complex execution that included tempera and wax. At once, Moreau became hugely in demand by several collectors who wanted their own versions of the work. The present painting Saint Sébastien et l'ange is the most important of these versions. With similar dimensions as the exhibited painting of 1876, it has a number of different features that have led to it to be given a different title. The angel has bright cobalt blue, not deep red, wings and a head crowned with thorns. The female saints who chaperone the tortured victim in the 1876 painting have disappeared in this work, and are replaced by a shield and a quiver visible behind the tree to which the martyr is attached, serving as a reminder that Saint Sebastian was a Roman soldier. In the upper part of the painting, the artist has painted a bush amongst the green and auburn foliage rather than the luminous haze in the original painting. These differences imbue the painting with a more Pre-Raphaelite feel, while the angel's head itself further bears a particular similarity to those executed by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, whom Moreau held in high esteem.

This painting is listed under no. 32 in the inventory that Moreau himself made of his works on 4 June 1885; 'paintings in progress in the workshop and some archived and framed works' (Livre rouge, Archives du Musée Gustave Moreau, p. 72). Both this painting and Sainte Cécile (listed as no. 31) were noted opposite in writing as 'sold'. The buyer was a young dealer named Isidore Montaignac, who had previously worked at the famous Georges Petit gallery and who set up at 9, rue Caumartin in 1886, in the art gallery district of Paris. On 11 June later that year, Montaignac wrote to Moreau saying that he had sold Saint Sébastien to a Parisian art lover, believed to be Madame Thérèse Humbert, the famous adventuress who lived in unimaginable luxury, pretending to be the heiress of an American multimillionaire, Crawford, but who then caused great scandal by going bankrupt. Consequentially, she had to sell two Moreau paintings at auction with Hôtel Drouot on 20 and 21 June 1902. These were David (The Armand Hammer Collection, Los Angeles) and the present painting, which was bought at the auction by a collector from Marseille called Zarifi, in whose family it remained until the end of the twentieth century.

The martyrdom of Saint Sebastian is one of the most prevalent themes in Moreau's work. Apart from the works that he sold, the Gustave Moreau Museum has several notable versions, in both oil and watercolour, while the Clemens-Sels-Museum in Neuss, Germany, The Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri and The Museum of Fine Art, Gifu, Japan all display other minor versions.

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

No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 17.5% will be added to the buyer's premium, which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis.