Salomé

Gustave Moreau returned to Salome again and again, the princess who danced for King Herod and asked, as her reward, for the head of John the Baptist. Through the 1870s he painted and drew her in version after version, loading the scene with jewels, incense, and strange architecture until the old story felt like a fever dream. When his Salomes were shown in Paris in 1876 they caused a sensation, and the novelist Huysmans built a whole worshipful passage around one of them. This canvas is one of the treatments Moreau kept for himself. He lived and worked in this house and left it, crammed with his own pictures, to become the museum that now bears his name, so his Salomes still hang in the rooms where he made them.