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Description: s - GUSTAVE MOREAU FRENCH, 1826-1898 APOLLON RECEVANT LES OFFRANDES DES BERGERS (OU APOLLON ET LES SATYRES)

signed Gustave Moreau (lower right)

oil on panel

We are grateful to Pierre-Louis Mathieu and Geneviève Lacambre for providing additional catalogue information.
PROVENANCE

Allard and Noël, Paris, by circa 1895
Dr. Chauffard, Paris
Mme. Chauffard
Hector Brame, Paris
Richard Feigen, New York, by 1974
Jean Davray, Geneva
A Private Foundation
EXHIBITED

Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, Gustave Moreau, 1906, no. 27, (coll. of Mme. Chauffard)

LITERATURE AND REFERENCES

"Mizue", 1973, no. 822, illustrated
Pierre-Louis Mathieu, Gustave Moreau. Sa vie, son oeuvre: Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre achevé Paris, 1998, p. 389, no. 359, illustrated(dated circa 1885)
Geneviève Lacambre, Peintures, cartons, aquarelles, etc. exposés dans les galeries du Musée Gustave Moreau, (first edition 1904) revised ed. 1990, nos. 185 and 1112, (for the large cartoon and a drawing)
For related works, see a series of preliminary studies and a large cartoon in the inventory of the Musée Gustave Moreau: nos. 3789, 3791, 3827, 3795, 6990 recto, 10975 and 10928 (three of which are illustrated in this entry)
CATALOGUE NOTE

Moreau was one of the main proponents of the Symbolist movement of painters and poets from the mid 1880s onwards. He influenced Matisse, Rouault and as well as the Fauve painters. In this exquisite and quintessential Symbolist picture he manifests the ideals of the Movement, resolving the conflict between the material and spiritual world and presenting a visual expression of the mystical and the occult.

Geneviève Lacambre, former director of the Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris, dates this work to circa 1893, basing her date on the elaborate symbolist style Moreau employed in similar paintings at this time.

The present work depicts the sun god, Apollo, twin brother to Diana, goddess of the moon and son of Zeus. Apollo was the god of music, principally the lyre, and he directed the choir of the Muses. He was also the god of prophecy, colonization, medicine, archery, poetry, dance, intellectual inquiry and he was protector of herds and flocks. As the god of light, he was also known as "Phoebus" (radiant or beaming) which is conveyed in the present picture by the brilliant red rays and the nimbus surrounding Apollo's face, a paragon of astonishing freshness and beauty. Rather than donning a laurel crown, Moreau has painted him holding a laurel branch-- the quiver and lyre are by his feet. The crescent moon in the upper left is the attribute of his sister.

The critic Pierre-Louis Mathieu describes this work as "enigmatic" and relates it to one of the myths of Apollo regarding his son, Aesculapius, who was endowed by his father with such skill in the healing art that he even restored the dead to life. At this Pluto took alarm, and prevailed on Zeus to launch a thunderbolt at Aesculapius. Apollo was indignant at the destruction of his son, and wreaked his vengeance on the innocent workmen who had made the thunderbolt. These were the Cyclopses, whose workshop was located under Mount Aetna, from which the smoke and flames of their furnaces were constantly spewing. Apollo shot his arrows at the Cyclopses, which so incensed Zeus that he condemned him as a punishment to become the servant of a mortal for the space of one year. Accordingly, Apollo went into the service of Admetus, king of Thessaly, and pastured his flocks on the verdant banks of the river Amphrysos.

In the present work, Apollo is being venerated by the satyrs, who were deities of the woods and fields. They were believed to be covered with bristly hair, their heads decorated with short, sprouting horns and their feet like the hooves of a goat. Apollo stands above them on a mound of mossy rocks, with cliffs and leafy vegetation at left and a mysterious, deep blue gorge at right with snowcapped peaks in the distance. One cannot be too literal in interpreting Moreau's imagery?from 1875 onwards his dreamworld would cast a spell over his mythological subjects and they would become even more inexplicable.

According to Douglas Druick, "Moreau explored the theme of humankind's potential for good and evil, enlightenment and chaos, employing symbolic contrasts between light and dark, beauty and monstrosity, that were structured by a vision of human history newly enlarged and problematized by evolutionary theory. Moreau wedded the insights of ancient myths with those of Darwinist explanation to convey the epic battle between the body's basest passions and the soul's loftiest aspirations. For this process of imaginative synthesis, Moreau drew, as would Odile Redon, upon his inner, personal experience of life." (Geneviève Lacambre, with contributions by Larry J. Feinberg, Marie-Laure de Contenson and Douglas Druick, Gustave Moreau, Between Epic and Dream, 1999, exh. cat., p. 36)

"Moreau assumed that the elements of his symbolic language?the mythic figures and situations he incorporated?would remain legible to his audience. He could not have imagined that, as a result of cultural changes, even an educated twentieth-century audience would by no means fully share his familiarity with the classics; that the symbolism of certain of his works would then become inaccesible, rebus-like in exactly the sense that Moreau protested against. It is not through iconography but rather through the more essential language of art?line, form, tone, and color?that Moreau's work continues to communicate with the present." (Lacambre, p. 38) To our modern eye, however, it also is a link to the distant past. In 1866 Théophile Gautier wrote, "One had to have seen many pictures by Mantegna, Botticelli, Verrochio and the early Renaissance painters who began to blend the sense of the antique with the forms of Gothic art in order to fully understand the style of M. Gustave Moreau."

In the 1860's Moreau painted two large canvases forming a pair devoted to the god of poetry, Hesiod and the Muses (1860, Paris, Musée Gustave Moreau) and The Muses Leaving their Father Apollo to Go and Enlighten the World, (1868, Paris, Musée Gustave Moreau). Almost three meters tall, the quality and size illustrate the importance the artist attached to the subject of the poet's inspiration. In the mid 1880's and early 1890's he would return to the theme of Apollo, in watercolor, Apollon et Marsyas (1890, 33 x 23,5 cm) and in oil on panel, Apollon vainqueur du Serpent Python, (ca. 1885, 9 by 6 1/2 in., Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada) and the present work.

In 1906, the present work was included in the great Exposition Gustave Moreau organized by the Countess Greffulhe at the Galerie Georges Petit, an event which attained the heights of brilliant worldliness according to contemporary observers. The two hundred and nine works exhibited -the Musée Gustave Moreau refused to lend?came for the most part from the smartest salons in Paris.

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Dimensions: 10 1/8 by 8 5/8 in.

26 by 22 cm