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Dimensions: 30 by 16.5cm., 11½ by 6½in.

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Provenance: Gustave Duruflé
Sale: Christie's, Monaco, 30 June 1995, lot 149
Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

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Literature: Pierre-Louis Mathieu, Gustave Moreau, sa vie, son oeuvre; catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre achevé, Paris, 1976, pp. 300-301, no. 77
Pierre-Louis Mathieu, Gustave Moreau, Monographie et nouveau catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre achevé, Paris, 1998, p. 300, no. 90, catalogued and illustrated

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Notes: Executed circa 1865-70, the present work is a finished pencil and ink version of the large oil Orphée of 1865 in the Musée d'Orsay.

The oil was exhibited to great acclaim at the Paris Salon of 1866, and was bought by the French state immediately after the exhibition. Widely circulated as an engraving at the time, Orphée became one of Moreau's most famous and popular compositions.

The livret of the 1866 Salon described the subject as follows: 'A girl reverently gathers up the head of Orpheus and his lyre borne on the waters of the Hebros to the shores of Thrace.' Moreau had already conceived the idea in 1860, when he wrote in his note book: 'A girl finds floating on the water of a stream the head and lyre of Orpheus. / She gathers them up reverently. Tender gesture' (Musée Gustave Moreau, Archive, GM 500, p. 3). By 1864 Moreau had developed on the idea and finalised the composition. He first executed preparatory studies, working with a nude model whom he posed holding a board cut into the shape of a lyre and using a plaster cast of the face of Michelangelo's Dying Slave for the head of Orpheus.

In addition to the present work and the oil of 1865, Moreau also painted three watercolour versions of the subject in 1864-65, a réduction in oil on canvas of the Salon oil in 1865, and a variant version of the subject in oil on panel (see Pierre-Louis Mathieu, op. cit., 1976, pp. 300-301, nos. 71-77), all with slight variations.

The present work is the only known finished pencil and ink version of Orphée, and bears striking similarity to the first watercolour Moreau produced of the subject in 1864 (Mathieu 1976, no. 73), prior to executing the Salon oil, and the later, smaller oil on panel of 1875 (Mathieu 1998, no. 85).