The story
Climb to the top of a townhouse on the rue de La Rochefoucauld in Paris and you reach two vast studios joined by a spiral iron staircase, their walls hung almost frame to frame, with cabinets of drawings that open out on hinged panels. Gustave Moreau, the Symbolist painter of Salome and the Chimaeras, designed this space to outlive him.
In 1895 he had the young architect Albert Lafon turn the upper floors of the family house into galleries, while the rooms below stayed a private apartment full of family furniture and keepsakes. Two years later he decided to leave the building and everything in it to the French state, and he died in 1898. The museum opened in 1903, with his former pupil Georges Rouault, later a famous painter himself, as its first curator.
What hangs there is the working life of one man, finished canvases beside sketches he never completed and thousands of drawings. Among the best known is his Salome dancing before Herod, her body covered with fine lines of ornament that make her look tattooed, and the late Mystic Flower, with the Virgin seated on a giant lily. The museum also keeps a portrait of the young Moreau painted around 1860 by his friend Edgar Degas, soon after the two artists had met in Italy.
