Salomé dansant devant Hérode

Moreau spent about seven years on this picture before sending it to the Paris Salon of 1876, where it caused a sensation. Salome dances before Herod to win the head of John the Baptist, but Moreau drains the story of action. She moves slowly, almost trance-like, through a vast temple encrusted with ornament, jewels and shadow, more a hall from a dream than any real palace. A few years later the novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans made the painting a centrepiece of his 1884 novel A rebours, whose reclusive hero owns this canvas and its watercolour companion, The Apparition, and studies them for hours on end.