Hercules and the Lernaean Hydra

Moreau showed this at the Paris Salon of 1876, and hung beside it the painting that would make him notorious that year, his shimmering Salome. Here he takes an older subject, the second labor of Hercules, and drains the heroics out of it. Hercules stands stiff and still on the left. Across a stagnant marsh the Hydra rears its many heads, and around its base lie the broken, rotting bodies of everyone who tried before. Moreau piled on detail like a jeweler, then set it in a landscape of primordial ooze. He rarely sold or even finished such pictures, keeping most of them in the Paris house that is now his museum.