J. K. Huysmans wrote, "Gustave Moreau has given new freshness to dreary old subjects by a talent both subtle and ample: he has taken myths worn out by the repetitions of centuries and expressed them in a language that is persuasive and lofty, mysterious and new.

His art (and symbolism in general) fell from favor and received little attention in the early 20th century but, beginning in the 1960s and 70s, he has come to be considered among the most paramount of symbolist painters.

Chassériau's premature death in 1856 deeply affected Moreau, and he left Paris to travel in Italy from 1857 to 1859, returning with hundreds of copies and studies he made of old master paintings there.

His parents bought a townhouse in 1852 at 14 Rue de La Rochefoucauld, converting the top floor into a studio for Moreau, where he lived and worked, a bachelor, for the rest of his life, his father dying in 1862, and his mother, Adèle-Pauline in 1884.

During a turbulent period in French history his father worked for the city of Paris, but being of liberal leanings, he was at times dismissed and later reinstated from various offices as powers shifted.

In 1837 he began attending the Collège Rollin (Collège-lycée Jacques-Decour) in Paris as a boarder, but in 1840 when his older sister died at the age of 13, he was withdrawn from the school and lived a somewhat sheltered life with his parents.

His style soon drifted away from those favored by the academy, but many of the basic Beaux-Arts methods and concepts he learned would remain with him for the rest of his life, as would his commitment to history painting.

Chassériau never attended the École des Beaux-Arts, but he was driven and hardworking and managed to establish a reputation for himself, securing commissions, and living a rather bohemian and sometimes turbulent life.

There was no Salon in 1854, although he received a commission from the state in 1854 for Athenians being Delivered to the Minotaur in the Cretan Labyrinth which was shown at the 1855 Paris World's Fair and purchased for 4,000 francs for the Bourg-en-Bresse Museum.

He frequented the Villa Medici, where he could work from live models, and there he established friendships with other Parisians studying in Italy, including Elie Delaunay, Henri Chapu, Émile Lévy, and Georges Bizet.

Examples include some large drawings on the theme of Hesiod and the Muse and a number of fine landscapes in watercolors, painted en plein air.

In the past some biographers speculated that he was gay, largely inferred from the fact that he was a bachelor, a lack of information regarding women in his life, and the sometimes effeminate or androgynous appearance of male figures in some of his paintings.

Moreau apparently met Alexandrine soon after his return from Italy and in following years he produced many drawings and watercolors of her, as well as romantic caricatures of the two of them walking on clouds together.

[3]: 149 & 225 p. Art collector Anthony Roux commissioned several artists to produce works based on Jean de La Fontaine's Fables in 1879, including Moreau, Paul-Jacques-Aimé Baudry, Jules-Élie Delaunay, Gustave Doré, Henri Gervex, Henri Harpignies, Ernest Hébert, Nélie Jacquemart, Eugène Lami, Jean-François Raffaëlli, Félix Ziem, and others.

In the only private show in his life, 64 La Fontaine fables with six other large watercolors were exhibited at the Goupil & Cie Gallery in 1886, where Thëo Van Gogh was manager, and later in London.

Remarkably, after Roux's death in 1914, 63 of the watercolors were sold to a single collector, and although regarded as among his finest work, they were not exhibited by the buyer, or their heirs, for well over 100 years, and are known only from some early, low quality black and white reproductions.

However, on his death bed, Élie Delaunay (a close friend since their time in Rome) asked Moreau to succeed him and direct one of the main ateliers at the school.

As early as 1896 Roger-Marx wrote, "The fires of insurrection have been lit in the very heart of the École des Beaux-Arts: all the rebels against routine all those who wish to develop in their own individual way, have gathered under the shield of Gustave Moreau.

He took his pupils to the Louvre to study and copy the masters, unheard of at the École des Beaux-Arts: Matisse said "It was an almost revolutionary attitude on his part to show us the way to the Museum.

Yesterday at half past one I was walking along the embankment when I met Gustave Moreau, who like myself was on his way to see a good chum of mine, Henri Matisse, a delicate painter, skilful in the art of using grays.

Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts], some ten canvases, with beautiful colors, practically all of them still lifes, and they provided the starting point for talk about everything connected with art, including music.

[19]: 27 p.  Matisse said, "Gustave Moreau's great quality was to regard the mind of a young student as needing to develop continuously throughout his life, and not to push him to get through the various scholastic examinations.

"[18]: 117 p.  Matisse had been denied admission to the École des Beaux-Arts, but Moreau saw him drawing in the public courtyard of the school and invited him to join his class, exempting him from the entrance examination.

Moreau arrived at the idea of leaving his house to the state as a museum, and remodeled his townhome in 1895, expanding his small studio on the top floor into a much larger exhibition space.

After about a year of declining health, Moreau died of stomach cancer on 18 April 1898 and was buried at the Cimetière de Montmartre in Paris in his parents' tomb.

He left instructions stipulating that his death was not to be announced in the press; his funeral was to be a very small, simple service; and any flowers were to be placed on the grave of Alexandrine Dureux, not his own.

[1]: 110 p.  The Musée national Gustave Moreau at 14 rue de la Rochefoucauld (9th arrondissement), opened to the public on 14 January 1903, with his former student Georges Rouault appointed curator.

"[4]: dj  He influenced the next generation of Symbolists, particularly leading figures in Belgian Symbolism such as Jean Delville and Fernand Khnopff, and Odilon Redon in France.

"[2]: 178 p. Many poets and writers of the day revered Moreau's paintings, Théophile Gautier, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul de Saint-Victor, and Emile Zola all praised his work.

[3]: 223 p.  With the rise and prevalence of realism, impressionism and postimpressionism, followed by the onslaught of fauvism, cubism, futurism, expressionism, abstract art, and dada, Moreau (and most symbolist painting not realized in an expressionist style), appeared less relevant to modernism and was all but forgotten.