Gustave Moreau’s Bible Paintings: The Homebody Who Painted Salome

• Who: Gustave Moreau (1826–1898), French painter, a leading figure of Symbolism, the movement that painted dreams, myths and ideas rather than everyday life.
• Born: Paris, 6 April 1826, the son of an architect, Louis Moreau.
• Died: Paris, 18 April 1898, of stomach cancer. He had a church funeral at La Trinité and was buried in the family vault at Montmartre.
• Home: 14 rue de La Rochefoucauld, now the Musée Gustave Moreau.
• Big moment: the Salon of 1876, where he showed Salome twice, in an oil and in a watercolour.
• Never married. The museum calls Alexandrine Dureux, who died in 1890, his “best and only friend.”
• Taught: Henri Matisse and Georges Rouault, among others, at the École des Beaux-Arts from 1892.
• In our collection: 34 Bible and saint pictures, from a three-metre State commission to pictures about the size of a paperback. One of them even its museum isn’t sure he painted.
• Bible text: Berean Standard Bible (BSB). Susanna, which the BSB doesn’t include, is quoted from the King James Apocrypha.

• Salome: the pictures that made him famous
• The Old Testament: from a three-metre debut to the 1878 World’s Fair
• Eve, Delilah and Susanna
• Saints, hermits and a lily watered with blood
• Parables: stories without an address
• The Passion and Easter: the pictures that stayed home
• Real life vs. the paintings · Myths, busted · How to pray with a Moreau · FAQ

In 1869 Moreau’s Salon pictures were received rather coolly by the critics, in the words of his own museum’s chronology (the Hammer Museum calls the response intensely negative), and he stayed away from the Salon for six years. In 1876 he came back with four works, two of them Salome. Zola, reviewing that Salon for the same St Petersburg magazine, saved Moreau for the end as “the most astonishing example of the extravagances an artist can fall into in the search for originality and the hatred of realism,” and concluded that the danger to science was slight: “People shrug their shoulders and walk on, that is all.”

Eight years later, a novel stopped them in their tracks. In À rebours (Against Nature, 1884), a novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans, the jaded aesthete Des Esseintes owns both of Moreau’s 1876 Salomes and spends pages swooning over them, and the book turned Moreau’s dancer into a cult image. Huysmans came to Moreau’s house exactly once, on 6 June 1885, and the museum’s chronology records it as their only meeting.

A word before the paintings: the Gospels never name the dancing girl. Matthew and Mark call her “the daughter of Herodias.” The name Salome comes from the Jewish historian Josephus, who never mentions a dance but does say John was put to death at the fortress of Machaerus.

Salome Dancing before Herod (1876)

The story: At King Herod Antipas’s birthday banquet, the daughter of Herodias, whom Josephus names Salome, dances and pleases him so much that he swears to give her whatever she asks; prompted by her mother, she asks for the head of John the Baptist, whom Herod had jailed for condemning his marriage to Herodias (Matthew 14:1–11; Mark 6:17–28).

On Herod’s birthday, however, the daughter of Herodias danced before them and pleased Herod so much that he promised with an oath to give to her whatever she asked.

Matthew 14:6–7 · BSB

Zola, who had already mocked Moreau’s Hercules at the same Salon, found this one “even more bizarre.” Then he quoted another critic’s description of the dancer: one arm stretched out, the other bent, a flower held before her face. “That is her whole dance,” that critic concluded, adding that nobody had ever made the tetrarch’s madness easier to understand.

The flower is the famous part. In Huysmans’s novel, Des Esseintes hangs this oil in his study and reads the white lotus at her face as “the sceptre of Isis.” The dancer herself becomes “the goddess of immortal Hysteria,” “the monstrous Beast, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible,” which is a lot to hang on one flower and a raised arm. The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, which owns the canvas, built an entire 2012 exhibition around it.

Matthew’s account is flat by comparison: a dance, a pleased king, an oath. In verse 9 Herod is “grieved,” but he gives the order anyway, “because of his oaths and his guests.” An oath kept for the sake of the guests became a death sentence, and Matthew records no one at the table objecting.

The Apparition (1876)

The story: After Herod had John the Baptist beheaded in prison and the head was brought on a platter to the daughter of Herodias (Salome) (Matthew 14:10–11; Mark 6:27–28), the Gospels move on without describing any vision. Moreau invents one: the severed head, ringed in light, hanging in the air of Herod’s palace before the dancer.

But when Herod heard this, he said, “John, whom I beheaded, has risen from the dead!”

Mark 6:16 · BSB

Des Esseintes owns this one too, and for him it was “perhaps even more disturbing” than the oil. Gone is the goddess. His verdict on this dancer, in our literal translation: “Here she was truly a harlot.” (The novel’s 1922 English translator, John Howard, softened the word to “Woman.”)

The Musée d’Orsay traces the glowing head to a Japanese print Moreau copied in 1869 and to Benvenuto Cellini’s bronze head of Medusa. Moreau reworked, scraped and incised the watercolour, and a Belgian dealer, Léon Gauchez, bought it at the 1876 Salon for 8,000 francs. You’ll read online that Oscar Wilde wrote his play Salomé after seeing it at the Louvre in 1884. In 1884 it belonged to a private collector, Charles Hayem, and it reached a public museum only in 1898; the link scholars actually trace runs through Huysmans’s novel.

In Mark, it’s Herod who is haunted. John had told him plainly that his marriage was wrong, and Herod silenced him; then the reports about Jesus sounded to him like John come back.

Salome at the Prison

The story: Bound by the oath he swore at his birthday banquet, King Herod sends an executioner to behead John the Baptist in prison and bring the head on a platter to Herodias’s daughter, Salome (Mark 6:26–28). Moreau imagines her standing inside the prison itself, head bowed, a small red flower held to her face.

So without delay, the king commanded that John’s head be brought in. He sent an executioner, who went and beheaded him in the prison.

Mark 6:27 · BSB

Not every Moreau Salome is a man-eater. The National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, which owns this small canvas, says that where fin-de-siècle art often made her a femme fatale, here Moreau “focuses on the emotional undercurrents of her reaction to St. John’s beheading.”

The canvas itself had a long wait. The Japanese collector Kojiro Matsukata bought it in Paris in 1921 for 11,000 francs. The French government sequestered it in 1944, it became French property in 1952 under the San Francisco Peace Treaty, and France transferred it to Japan only in January 1959. (In 2025 it was lent to a Tokyo exhibition on Aubrey Beardsley, who illustrated Wilde’s Salomé.)

Mark moves from oath to execution “without delay.” Moreau slows the story down to the girl standing in the prison, and the Gospel gives her no feelings at all. It leaves the question to us: what does it feel like to get exactly what you asked for?

Salome Dancing before the Head of Saint John the Baptist

The story: At Herod’s birthday feast the daughter of Herodias (Salome) dances, wins the king’s oath and, at her mother’s prompting, claims the head of John the Baptist, which is brought to her on a platter (Matthew 14:6–11). This small watercolour squeezes both moments into one frame: the girl still dancing, eyes closed, while the haloed head already rests on its stand behind her.

John’s head was brought in on a platter and presented to the girl, who carried it to her mother.

Matthew 14:11 · BSB

Plot twist: the Metropolitan Museum in New York isn’t sure Moreau painted this. It catalogues the 25-centimetre sheet as “After? Gustave Moreau,” question mark included, meaning it may be someone else’s version of his Salome. We’ve kept it here with the Met’s question mark attached, because it’s in our collection and because it shows how completely his dancer took over the story.

The mother who wanted the head isn’t at the banquet; Mark says the girl had to go out and ask her, “What should I request?” (Mark 6:24). The paintings blame the dancer. Mark points past her to Herodias, who “held a grudge against John and wanted to kill him,” and says that on Herod’s birthday “her opportunity arose” (Mark 6:19, 21).

Moreau’s parents backed his career in the most practical way possible: in 1850 they rented him a studio near that of the painter Théodore Chassériau, whose style, historians note, he absorbed so thoroughly that critics filed him as a follower. He had already failed the Prix de Rome twice, losing the 1849 final to a painter named Gustave Boulanger, a name worth remembering.

His Salon debut in 1852, a large Pietà, drew a famous joke from the critic Théophile Gautier: Moreau’s teacher, François-Édouard Picot, must be as astonished at having produced such a pupil “as a hen that has hatched duck eggs.”

The Song of Songs (1853)

The story: In the Song of Songs a young woman rises at night to open the door to her beloved, finds him gone and searches the city for him; the watchmen on their rounds beat her and take away her cloak (Song of Solomon 5:6–7). Moreau painted the scene in 1852–53 for the French State.

I encountered the watchmen on their rounds of the city. They beat me and bruised me; they took away my cloak, those guardians of the walls.

Song of Solomon 5:7 · BSB

Out of the Bible’s great love poem, the young Moreau picked the one violent moment. The museum in Dijon, which owns the three-metre canvas, goes further than the text: its own description says the young woman is brutalised and raped by the city guards, who are drunk, with a wine cup standing in for their drunkenness. The Song says they beat her, bruised her and took her cloak, and no more.

The State commissioned it in November 1852 for 2,000 francs, with help, according to French catalogue sources, from a relative at the Ministry of the Interior. For his debut Pietà the ministry had paid 600 francs, which the Moreau museum calls “the price of a copy.” At the Salon of 1853 the picture made little noise; historians note that Courbet’s scandalous Bathers took the attention that year.

Bruised and robbed, the woman in the Song doesn’t give up. She turns straight to the daughters of Jerusalem and asks them to tell her beloved she is “sick with love” (Song of Solomon 5:8).

Moses in Sight of the Promised Land, Taking Off His Sandals (1854)

The story: At the burning bush on Mount Horeb, God tells Moses to take off his sandals because he is standing on holy ground (Exodus 3:5); forty years later, God shows Moses the Promised Land from Mount Nebo but does not let him enter it (Deuteronomy 34:1–4). Moreau’s 1854 title joins the two into one scene: Moses, at the edge of Canaan, taking off his sandals.

“Do not come any closer,” God said. “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.”

Exodus 3:5 · BSB

Go looking for this scene in your Bible and you’ll come back empty-handed. Moreau’s title fuses two episodes, and his museum’s record crowds the scene with the Ark of the Covenant, a priest, a family and grapes, while Deuteronomy sends Moses up Mount Nebo with no one but the LORD.

About those grapes: a dark cluster hangs at the right edge, perhaps a nod to the giant cluster the spies carried back from Canaan (Numbers 13:23). The canvas is almost two and a half metres tall, signed and dated 1854, and it stayed in Moreau’s studio until he died. We haven’t found a record of why.

Between the bush and the mountain lie Moses’ forty years of leading Israel. He began that calling barefoot on holy ground and ended it looking at a land he would not cross into. One way to read Moreau’s mash-up: the ground was holy because God met him there, long before Moses ever saw the land.

The next three pictures were shown together at the 1878 World’s Fair in Paris, where Moreau sent eleven works. Harvard, which owns two of them, says the trio of The Infant Moses, Jacob and the Angel and King David stood for the three ages of man. Zola, reviewing again for his Russian readers, admitted that Moreau’s theories “shock me and irritate me.”

The Infant Moses (c. 1876–78)

The story: In Egypt, where Pharaoh has ordered every Hebrew baby boy thrown into the Nile, a Levite mother hides her baby son, the future Moses, for three months, then sets him in a tarred papyrus basket among the reeds, where Pharaoh’s own daughter will find him (Exodus 1:22–2:6).

But when she could no longer hide him, she got him a papyrus basket and coated it with tar and pitch. Then she placed the child in the basket and set it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile.

Exodus 2:3 · BSB

Harvard quotes Moreau setting “this people of mummies, sphinxes, and gods with staring eyes and unmoving gaze” against “this fine human fruit full of sap and life.” In Exodus the scene is crowded, with a mother, a watching sister, a princess and her maids, and none of them appears in Moreau’s picture. The only other faces are stone: two pharaoh-like figures in striped headcloths and a colossal carved eye in the rock.

The sleeping baby also has two sheaves of light springing from his head. Artists usually save those rays for the grown Moses coming down from Sinai, when his face had become “radiant from speaking with the LORD” (Exodus 34:29). Moreau hands them to the three-month-old in advance.

Hebrews 11:23 files this moment under faith: “By faith Moses’ parents hid him for three months after his birth,” and they “were unafraid of the king’s edict.”

Jacob and the Angel (1874–78)

The story: On his way home to Canaan, with his estranged brother Esau coming to meet him, Jacob sends his family across the ford of the Jabbok at night and is left alone; a mysterious man wrestles with him until daybreak, dislocates his hip and renames him Israel (Genesis 32:22–30).

So Jacob was left all alone, and there a man wrestled with him until daybreak. When the man saw that he could not overpower Jacob, he struck the socket of Jacob’s hip and dislocated it as they wrestled.

Genesis 32:24–25 · BSB

It’s a very lopsided wrestling match. Jacob strains, head down, while the haloed angel stands calm behind him and grips his arm. According to Harvard, Moreau condemned Eugène Delacroix’s famous 1861 version and wrote that his own captured the futility of Jacob’s fight against an invisible and infinitely more powerful foe.

He also gave it a political reading. In an 1878 letter he said the Jacob stood for “the angel of France” halting an “idiotic race towards matter.” That’s a heavy load for one angel, and a very Moreau way of complaining about the modern world.

Genesis tells a different match. The man “could not overpower Jacob,” and the new name comes with a verdict: “you have struggled with God and with men, and you have prevailed.” Jacob wins by refusing to let go. “I will not let you go unless you bless me,” he says, and he walks away limping and blessed.

King David (1878)

The story: At the end of his life King David, the shepherd who became Israel’s king and its “sweet psalmist,” speaks his last words, declaring that the Spirit of the LORD spoke through him (2 Samuel 23:1–2). Moreau shows him old and silent on his throne, with an angel at his feet.

The Spirit of the LORD spoke through me; His word was on my tongue.

2 Samuel 23:2 · BSB

Forget the boy with the sling. This is the old king of the 1878 trio, and a Sotheby’s catalogue for Moreau’s gouache of the same subject says the angel has come “to collect the patriarch’s last songs.” Sotheby’s also quotes Moreau describing the old king meditating on the “divine mysteries of immortality.”

He had been carrying the idea for years. That gouache, dedicated to his friend Charles Gavard, dates from before 1871 according to the Moreau scholar Pierre-Louis Mathieu, and it came up at Sotheby’s in Paris in 2019 with an estimate of €250,000–350,000. The big canvas went to Los Angeles, where the Hammer Museum also owns his Salome.

David’s last words don’t mention Goliath. At their heart are who was speaking through him, “His word was on my tongue,” and the promise God made to his house: “He has established with me an everlasting covenant” (2 Samuel 23:5).

Song of Songs (1893)

The story: The Song of Songs is a cycle of love poems between a bride and her beloved; in 4:9 the bridegroom tells her, “my sister, my bride,” that she has captured his heart with one glance. Moreau’s 1893 watercolour tells no single episode; it shows the bride alone, richly adorned, with the book’s title lettered on the sheet.

You have captured my heart, my sister, my bride; you have stolen my heart with one glance of your eyes, with one jewel of your neck.

Song of Solomon 4:9 · BSB

Forty years after his three-metre Dijon canvas, Moreau came back to the Song in a watercolour 38.7 centimetres tall, and he lettered “Cantique des Cantiques” on the sheet himself. It went to the Paris dealers Allard et Noël the year he painted it, then to Renouard-Mante, and in 1923 to the Japanese textile magnate Ōhara Magosaburō. Its first recorded showing in Japan, that same year, was in an exhibition of Western masters held in a Kurashiki elementary school. It still hangs in Kurashiki, at the Ohara Museum of Art.

Jewish and Christian readers have long heard God’s love for His people in this poem. The line we’ve paired with it is the tender one: a single glance is enough. It’s a picture of being loved without having to earn it.

Salome made Moreau the painter of the femme fatale, and his note on one unfinished canvas has not aged well. He subtitled Les Chimères (not a Bible picture) a “Satanic Decameron” and wrote that it gathered “every form of passion, fantasy and caprice of women.” The women in this chapter don’t all fit that mould, though, and one of them is a woman falsely accused and cleared.

Eve

The story: In the Garden of Eden the serpent persuades the first woman that eating from the forbidden tree of the knowledge of good and evil will not kill her but make her like God (Genesis 3:1–5). Moreau paints Eve alone against the tree before any fruit is taken.

“You will not surely die,” the serpent told the woman. “For God knows that in the day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

Genesis 3:4–5 · BSB

Count the creatures. There’s the serpent Genesis names, on the ground by her bare feet, and there’s a second one Genesis never mentions: a small figure with red-and-blue wings perched behind her head. Moreau doesn’t label it, and we won’t either. Her eyes appear closed, her arms are crossed over her chest, and there’s no fruit in her hands.

We haven’t matched this Eve to a museum record, and the only date we have, around 1880–85, comes from a picture-library caption that may describe a different Eve.

The serpent’s pitch is a promise, and half of it came true: “the eyes of both of them were opened” (Genesis 3:7). What it left out was the cost. Temptation still tends to work that way, with the gain up front and the bill hidden.

Eve (study)

The story: In the Garden of Eden the woman sees that the fruit of the forbidden tree is good for food and pleasing to the eyes, takes it and eats, and gives some to her husband, who is with her (Genesis 3:6). This small watercolour shows her reaching up into the tree while a man, presumably Adam, sits at its foot.

When the woman saw that the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eyes, and that it was desirable for obtaining wisdom, she took the fruit and ate it. She also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate it.

Genesis 3:6 · BSB

It’s called Eve, but look who’s sitting under the tree. The title leaves him out; Genesis doesn’t. Her husband “was with her,” and here he sits with his head turned away in profile.

It’s a small watercolour, 16 by 19 centimetres, from Moreau’s own house-museum. The French national catalogue says several variants exist and that this is perhaps a study for an Eve painting sold in 1881. The date 1898 you’ll see online is when the State acquired it through his bequest, not when he painted it.

In Genesis the blame starts moving as soon as God asks questions. The man blames “the woman whom You gave me,” and the woman blames the serpent (Genesis 3:12–13). The title of this watercolour keeps the old habit going. God questions each of them in turn and pronounces His judgments, and before He sends them out of the garden, “the LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife, and He clothed them” (Genesis 3:21).

Delilah (c. 1896)

The story: Samson, Israel’s strongman judge, falls in love with Delilah, a woman of the Valley of Sorek; the Philistine lords each promise her 1,100 pieces of silver to learn the secret of his strength, and she lulls him to sleep on her lap and has his seven braids shaved off (Judges 16:4–19).

Some time later, Samson fell in love with a woman in the Valley of Sorek, whose name was Delilah.

Judges 16:4 · BSB

Samson is not visible. Moreau gives the whole canvas to Delilah, jewelled and enthroned in a dim palace, and the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico, which owns it, reads her as contemplating “the downfall of Samson.” Its label calls her “another example of the decadent femme fatale.” He painted her about two years before he died, so the femme fatale stayed with him to the end.

Judges, for the record, never calls Delilah a Philistine, and she doesn’t cut the hair herself: “she called a man to shave off the seven braids of his head” (Judges 16:19).

Judges slips one of its quietest mercies into the aftermath. Blind and in chains, Samson is not finished: “the hair of his head began to grow back after it had been shaved” (Judges 16:22). Even a man who threw his gift away still has a last prayer. It begins, “O Lord GOD, please remember me,” before it turns to revenge on the Philistines (Judges 16:28).

Susanna and the Elders

The story: According to the Greek additions to Daniel (the book of Susanna, Daniel 13 in Catholic Bibles), two elders serving as judges in Babylon hide in the garden of the rich Joacim to spy on his wife Susanna as she prepares to bathe; when she refuses them, they accuse her falsely, and young Daniel exposes their lie by questioning them separately.

And it fell out, as they watched a fit time, she went in as before with two maids only, and she was desirous to wash herself in the garden: for it was hot. And there was no body there save the two elders, that had hid themselves, and watched her.

Susanna 15–16 · KJV Apocrypha

Here is the Moreau woman who breaks the pattern. Susanna fills the centre, and the villains are almost invisible: two shadowy heads in a dark doorway at the far right edge, just as the text says they “had hid themselves.”

According to Sotheby’s, Moreau sold the picture in 1895, and at a Paris auction in 1906 it was catalogued as La Chaste Suzanne, “Chaste Susanna,” a title nobody ever gave his Salome. Since then, by the same account, it has been to Turin, Japan, New York and Hong Kong, which is considerably more travel than its painter ever did.

Most Protestant Bibles today leave her story out; the 1611 King James Version printed it among the Apocrypha, “set apart from the beginning of Daniel, because it is not in the Hebrew.” It’s a courtroom drama for the falsely accused. Susanna refuses, is condemned and cries out to God, and the truth comes out when young Daniel separates the witnesses. The story gives the credit to God: the whole assembly “praised God, who saveth them that trust in him” (Susanna 60).

Moreau painted saints for decades, yet in 1874 he declined a 50,000-franc commission to decorate the Chapel of the Virgin in the Panthéon, citing his health and his inexperience with decorative painting. In 1892 he also declined to exhibit at the occultist Salon de la Rose-Croix. For a painter so often called a mystic, he was remarkably good at saying no.

Saint Sebastian (Neuss, c. 1869)

The story: According to tradition, Sebastian was a Christian officer in Rome under the emperor Diocletian in the late third century, shot with arrows for his faith and left for dead; in the legend, the widow Irene came for his body, found him alive and nursed him. Moreau paints that quiet aftermath instead of the shooting.

We are hard pressed on all sides, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed.

2 Corinthians 4:8–9 · BSB

Moreau painted the rescue rather than the arrows, at least twice around 1869: this small horizontal panel on wood, and the upright picture below. The Clemens Sels Museum in Neuss, Germany, bought it in 1964, and by its own account it’s the only museum in Germany with four Moreaus. It reads the red around the stake as “an expression of the martyr’s torments,” colour doing the storytelling.

Paul’s list isn’t a promise of escape. In the same passage he writes, “We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body.” In the legend Sebastian was struck down and not destroyed, which is the shape of Paul’s list.

The Martyred Saint Sebastian (1869)

The story: In the same legend, after archers shot Sebastian and left him for dead, Christian women, led in the legend by Irene, came for his body, found him alive and tended his wounds. Moreau’s 1869 picture shows two women holding up the limp, haloed saint beneath a great tree.

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.

Romans 8:37 · BSB

Moreau’s own museum catalogues this subject under a title that says it all: Saintes Femmes (Saint Sébastien), “Holy Women (Saint Sebastian),” with the martyr demoted to the brackets. The picture itself, signed and dated 1869, is in the Saint Louis Art Museum, and a drawing for it is still in his house in Paris.

Paul credits the victory to “Him who loved us.” In the legend, the women’s part was to go out for a body and tend a living man’s wounds.

Saint Cecilia

The story: According to tradition, Cecilia was a Roman Christian noblewoman martyred in the early centuries of the Church; her legend says that at her wedding, while the musicians played, she sang in her heart to God alone, which made her the patron saint of music.

Praise Him with the sound of the horn; praise Him with the harp and lyre.

Psalm 150:3 · BSB

The patron saint of music usually gets an organ in paintings. Moreau hands her an ornate golden lyre instead. It isn’t an oil painting either, but gouache and watercolour, about 34 centimetres tall, and it reached the Metropolitan Museum in 2004 as a gift from Mrs Charles Wrightsman, after passing through a Paris sale in 1906.

The Met notes that Moreau was not a practising Christian, yet his belief in the spiritual value of art drew him to Catholic martyrs like Cecilia.

So is the lyre wrong? Psalm 150 hands out instruments to everyone, lyre included, and ends with an instruction broad enough for any instrument: “Let everything that has breath praise the LORD!”

Saint Martin

The story: According to legend, Martin, a young Roman soldier and later bishop of Tours, met a half-naked beggar at the gate of Amiens on a freezing winter day and cut his military cloak in two to clothe him; that night, the story goes, Christ appeared to him wearing the half-cloak.

And the King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of Mine, you did for Me.’

Matthew 25:40 · BSB

The legend puts the scene at the city gate of Amiens; Moreau moves it into a rocky gorge. He came back to Martin more than once, and his house-museum keeps a separate Saint Martin watercolour. We haven’t traced this picture to a museum, and its date of about 1882 comes from an online reproduction, so treat it as unconfirmed.

The legend’s ending echoes Jesus’s own words in Matthew 25: Martin gave half a cloak to a stranger, and in the dream it was Christ who was wearing it.

Saint George and the Dragon (1889–90)

The story: According to the medieval Golden Legend, George, a Christian soldier, came to a city terrorised by a dragon, found the king’s daughter chosen as its next victim and wounded the beast with his lance to save her. Moreau sets the crowned princess high on a rock beneath a castle, above the fight.

And the great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.

Revelation 12:9 · BSB

The National Gallery in London, which owns it, says Moreau completed it in 1889 but “began working on it many years earlier.” A Marseille shipowner, Louis Mante, bought it from him for 9,000 francs; the National Gallery bought it in 1976. The gallery links the composition to Raphael’s small Saint George in the Louvre and describes the princess’s cloak as “similar in design to a Middle Eastern carpet”: a touch of the East from a man who never went further east than Italy.

In Revelation, the ones who fight the dragon aren’t George at all but Michael and his angels, and the victory is explained two verses later: “They have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony” (Revelation 12:11). The legend gives the saint a lance; Revelation gives the credit to the Lamb.

Saint Margaret

The story: According to legend, Margaret of Antioch was a young Christian who refused to marry the Roman prefect Olybrius; in prison, tradition says, a dragon swallowed her and burst open when she made the sign of the cross, and she was later beheaded for her faith.

Behold, I have given you authority to tread on snakes and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy. Nothing will harm you.

Luke 10:19 · BSB

Moreau skips the famous miracle. Nobody is swallowed and nothing bursts: a haloed woman stands upright, serpent coils rise at the left edge, and a red-haired man lies sprawled on the steps below her with his face turned upward. Who he is, nobody has told us. We haven’t traced this one to a museum either, so its date is uncertain.

In Luke 10, Jesus gives His followers authority over snakes, then points them to better news than any victory over dragons: “rejoice that your names are written in heaven.”

A Saint in the Desert (c. 1879)

The story: Moreau doesn’t say which saint this is, and neither does the museum that owns it. The picture belongs to the tradition of Christian hermits who, from the early centuries of the Church, withdrew into desert caves to pray, and whom legend often shows comforted by angels.

The world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, and hid in caves and holes in the ground.

Hebrews 11:38 · BSB

It’s tiny: 21.5 by 12.5 centimetres, about the size of a paperback. The Petit Palais in Paris calls it simply A Saint in the Desert, and it came to the museum in 1924 as a gift recorded under the name of the art dealer Joseph Duveen, a man better known for selling Old Masters to American millionaires.

Hebrews 11 ends its roll call of faith with people it leaves unnamed: the ones who wandered in deserts and hid in caves. “The world was not worthy of them,” and the next verse adds, “These were all commended for their faith.”

The Temptation of Saint Anthony

The story: Tradition, following the fourth-century Life of Anthony by Athanasius, says the Egyptian hermit Anthony went into the desert to pray and was assailed there by the devil with visions and temptations. The museum identifies the two silhouettes in Moreau’s watercolour as the saint and a woman.

Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.

James 4:7 · BSB

If you can’t find Saint Anthony, you’re in good company. Moreau’s own museum describes this watercolour as “an abstract composition” in which “two silhouettes appear,” and doesn’t say which is which. It holds up this sheet as the one that “perfectly illustrates” the loose, blotted “tachiste” manner Moreau dared late in life, though it also warns that we “hastily” call such works abstract today.

James puts the order plainly: submit to God first, then resist. Anthony’s legend is a long illustration of that verse. Moreau strips the temptation down to two silhouettes and leaves the rest to us.

The Mystic Flower (c. 1890)

The story: This is not a Bible scene. In his own note on the picture, Moreau describes the Virgin Mary enthroned in the corolla of a giant lily, a flower of purity watered with the blood of the martyrs who died for her. The thematic verse is Song of Songs 2:2, “a lily among the thorns,” a line Christian tradition has applied to Mary.

Like a lily among the thorns is my darling among the maidens.

Song of Solomon 2:2 · BSB

Moreau explained this one himself, in a note later catalogues quote: the corolla of a great lily serves as the Virgin’s throne, and all the martyrs who died for her have watered this mystic flower, the symbol of purity, with their blood. So yes, the red streaming down the rock is the martyrs’ blood, and the haloed figures heaped below it are the martyrs.

Remember the Panthéon chapel he turned down? Some fifteen years later he painted the Virgin anyway, on a canvas more than two and a half metres tall, and it’s still in his house.

In Moreau’s picture, purity isn’t the absence of suffering. It grows among it, like a lily “among the thorns.”

Jesus’s parables come without dates or street addresses. Moreau painted the Good Samaritan again and again, and he came back to the Prodigal Son forty years after he first painted it.

The Good Samaritan (c. 1865)

The story: Jesus tells this parable to an expert in the law who, “wanting to justify himself,” asks, “And who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:25–29): a man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho is beaten and left half dead, a priest and a Levite pass by, and a Samaritan stops, bandages him and takes him to an inn.

But a Samaritan on a journey came upon him, and when he saw him, he had compassion. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him.

Luke 10:33–34 · BSB

Moreau’s house-museum holds four more oil versions of this parable, and a watercolour variant has passed through Christie’s. This one, a wooden panel a little bigger than a sheet of printer paper, was acquired by the Musée d’Orsay only in 2017, a century and a half after he painted it.

Jesus answers the lawyer’s question with a better one: “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” The lawyer answers without once saying the word Samaritan: “The one who showed him mercy.” And Jesus tells him, “Go and do likewise.”

The Wicked Rich Man (Dives and Lazarus)

The story: Jesus tells this parable to the Pharisees, “who were lovers of money” (Luke 16:14): a rich man lives in splendour every day while a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores, lies at his gate, and even the dogs come and lick his sores; after death their places are reversed.

And a beggar named Lazarus lay at his gate, covered with sores and longing to be fed with the crumbs that fell from the rich man’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores.

Luke 16:20–21 · BSB

Luke never names the rich man. “Dives” is simply Latin for “rich,” and the French title, Le Mauvais Riche, “the wicked rich man,” gives him a label instead of a name too. Of the two men, only the beggar gets a name.

Moreau pushes the feast into a dim glimpse through an opening high on the left and gives the foreground to Lazarus and a dog, its muzzle lowered to his cloth-wrapped leg.

The reversal in Luke is total. The rich man dies and is buried; the man with sores dies and is “carried by the angels to Abraham’s side” (Luke 16:22). The one the world stepped over is the one whose name the story remembers.

The Prodigal Son (1890)

The story: Jesus tells the parable of the prodigal son when the Pharisees and scribes grumble, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them” (Luke 15:1–2): a younger son takes his share of the estate early, squanders it in a distant country, and comes home to a father who runs to embrace him.

After a few days, the younger son got everything together and journeyed to a distant country, where he squandered his wealth in wild living.

Luke 15:13 · BSB

The famously solitary Moreau had help with the scenery. The French national record for this two-metre canvas says he first treated the subject in watercolour as early as 1850, took it up again in 1890, and did so “with the collaboration of Joseph Pay for the landscape.” Its list of what’s in the picture names the prodigal son, a crowd, a horse and a chariot, and no father.

Many readers take the father to be the parable’s real subject, and Luke gives him this sentence: “while he was still in the distance, his father saw him and was filled with compassion. He ran to his son, embraced him, and kissed him” (Luke 15:20). The son had rehearsed a speech. The father ran to him before he said a word of it.

Five of the eight pictures below are undated and still in Moreau’s house, and he had been worrying about keeping his work together for a long time. In a note his museum dates to Christmas Eve 1862, at 36, he was already thinking about his death and his “poor little works”: “Separated, they perish; taken together, they give a little idea of what I was like as an artist.” In 1895 he hired an architect, Albert Lafon, to turn his home into a museum of his own work, and his will of 1897 left it to the State. It opened in January 1903, and the museum says it still looks much as he arranged it.

Christ in the Garden of Olives

The story: On the night before His crucifixion, Jesus goes with His disciples to a place called Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives, withdraws about a stone’s throw from them and prays for the cup of suffering to pass, yet submits to His Father’s will (Luke 22:39–42; Matthew 26:36).

And He withdrew about a stone’s throw beyond them, where He knelt down and prayed, “Father, if You are willing, take this cup from Me. Yet not My will, but Yours be done.”

Luke 22:41–42 · BSB

The museum’s catalogue entry for what may be this picture contains exactly one comment: « le cadre est somptueux », “the frame is sumptuous.” Art criticism doesn’t get more minimal than that.

Luke says an angel came from heaven and strengthened Him, and that the disciples were asleep, “exhausted from sorrow.” Moreau paints neither, only one small haloed figure in red beneath a large tree, with a full moon caught in its branches, and the prayer still prayed: “Yet not My will, but Yours be done.”

Christ and the Two Thieves

The story: At the place called The Skull outside Jerusalem, Jesus is crucified between two criminals (Luke 23:33); one mocks Him, the other asks to be remembered, and Jesus promises him, “today you will be with Me in Paradise” (Luke 23:39–43).

When they came to the place called The Skull, they crucified Him there, along with the criminals, one on His right and the other on His left.

Luke 23:33 · BSB

Moreau gives the crossbeam to Christ alone; the two thieves are roped to bare posts. It’s an unusual choice, and it leaves only one cross in the picture.

Only Luke records this exchange between the crosses, and at its centre it is remarkably short: one sentence asking, “Jesus, remember me when You come into Your kingdom!”, and one sentence answering, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with Me in Paradise.”

Golgotha

The story: After Pilate hands Him over to be crucified, Jesus carries His own cross out to the Place of the Skull, called Golgotha in Hebrew, and is crucified there between two others, with Jesus in the middle (John 19:16–18).

Carrying His own cross, He went out to The Place of the Skull, which in Hebrew is called Golgotha. There they crucified Him, and with Him two others, one on each side, with Jesus in the middle.

John 19:17–18 · BSB

Moreau pulls the camera all the way back. The three crosses stand far off in a rocky gorge, with horsemen at the left and a low sun or moon on the horizon, and the landscape does most of the talking.

From this distance the crucifixion is easy to miss, yet John notes that “many of the Jews read this sign, because the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city” (John 19:20). It happened just outside town, in plain view.

Descent from the Cross

The story: On the evening of the crucifixion, Joseph of Arimathea asks Pilate for Jesus’s body, takes it down from the cross and wraps it in linen for burial (Mark 15:42–46). In Moreau’s unfinished oil sketch the body already lies on the ground near the cross, and the small group around it is almost swallowed by the landscape.

So Joseph bought a linen cloth, took down the body of Jesus, wrapped it in the cloth, and placed it in a tomb that had been cut out of the rock. Then he rolled a stone against the entrance to the tomb.

Mark 15:46 · BSB

His museum owns a second, different Descent from the Cross on a small wooden panel, and he painted the same subject for the Stations of the Cross at Decazeville, which you’ll meet below.

Mark includes a detail that’s easy to skip: Joseph “bought a linen cloth.” Burying Jesus took errands as well as nerve; three verses earlier, Mark says Joseph, “who himself was waiting for the kingdom of God, boldly went to Pilate to ask for the body of Jesus.”

Pietà (c. 1876)

The story: The Pietà, Mary holding her dead son’s body after it is taken from the cross, is a devotional tradition rather than a Gospel scene; John places Jesus’s mother near the cross (John 19:25) and records that Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus took the body for burial (John 19:38–40).

Near the cross of Jesus stood His mother and her sister, as well as Mary the wife of Clopas and Mary Magdalene.

John 19:25 · BSB

This panel, about 23 by 16 centimetres, has had a busier life than its painter. It was sold at a charity sale for Christian schools in May 1880, later belonged to the collector Charles Hayem, then, around 1921, to Kojiro Matsukata, after which it followed Salome at the Prison’s route to Tokyo. The National Museum of Western Art points out that Moreau adds the dove of the Holy Spirit and two angels to the grieving Virgin and the dead Christ.

Tradition put the body in her lap. John tells us only that she stood near the cross, and he records no word from her at all.

The Entombment (c. 1867)

The story: On the evening of the crucifixion, Joseph of Arimathea, a rich man and a disciple of Jesus, obtains the body from Pilate, wraps it in clean linen and lays it in his own new tomb cut into the rock, then rolls a great stone across the entrance (Matthew 27:57–60).

So Joseph took the body, wrapped it in a clean linen cloth, and placed it in his own new tomb that he had cut into the rock. Then he rolled a great stone across the entrance to the tomb and went away.

Matthew 27:59–60 · BSB

Moreau sold this little panel in 1872 to the Paris dealer Hector Brame, the same dealer who, according to the Tokyo museum, bought Salome at the Prison from him that December. The American collector Grenville L. Winthrop bought it in 1934 and left it to Harvard in 1943, and Harvard’s record says it may not be lent under the terms of that bequest. It has travelled anyway, once: to Tokyo in 2002, with the rest of the Winthrop collection. The title, Mise au Tombeau, is written in the margin below the picture.

Matthew closes the scene with the stone in place and Joseph gone. It looks like the end of the story. On the third day, that stone will be rolled away.

Christ and Mary Magdalene (Noli me tangere, c. 1889)

The story: Early on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene, weeping outside Jesus’s empty tomb in a garden near where He was crucified, mistakes the risen Jesus for the gardener until He calls her by name; He tells her not to cling to Him and sends her to tell His brothers (John 20:1, 11–17).

“Do not cling to Me,” Jesus said, “for I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go and tell My brothers, ‘I am ascending to My Father and your Father, to My God and your God.’”

John 20:17 · BSB

Mary reaches out with both hands, His hand comes down toward hers, and they don’t touch. The small jar on the ground between them is her traditional attribute, the ointment jar. This panel, about 81 by 65 centimetres, is much larger than his small Passion panels, and it’s still in private hands. In 2016 it was shown in New York in a gallery exhibition called Les Fleurs du Mal, “The Flowers of Evil,” an unlikely title for Easter morning.

In John, the first person the risen Jesus speaks to is a woman, and His message comes with a job. “Go and tell,” He says, and she does: “I have seen the Lord!”

Jesus at the Lake of Tiberias

The story: In John 21, seven disciples fish all night on the Sea of Tiberias, the Sea of Galilee, and catch nothing; at dawn the risen Jesus stands on the shore, unrecognised, and tells them to cast the net on the right side of the boat (John 21:1–6). The museum’s title for this oil sketch says only “Jesus at the Lake of Tiberias”; John 21 is our pairing.

Early in the morning, Jesus stood on the shore, but the disciples did not recognize that it was Jesus.

John 21:4 · BSB

The figures are patches of paint: a lone figure on the shore and a boat with several people in it, while the ridge, sky and water fill nearly the whole sketch.

At this size it’s easy to sympathise with the disciples, who didn’t recognise Him either. They knew Him by what He did: a net suddenly too full to haul in, and breakfast waiting on the shore.

Moreau’s pictures are full of dancing girls, severed heads, dragons and jewelled thrones. His life, on paper, was a long stretch of quiet, most of it in one house in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. Here is how the two compare.

He painted femmes fatales. He lived with his mother until he was 58. His father bought the house at 14 rue de La Rochefoucauld in Gustave’s name in 1852, and he lived there with his parents and then alone. His father died in 1862; his mother, Pauline, died in July 1884, aged 81. In her later years she was deaf, and according to the Musée Gustave Moreau he wrote to her on slips of paper, some of them explaining what his paintings meant.

He painted Salome’s cruelty. His great attachment was a thirty-year friendship. Soon after returning from Italy he met Alexandrine Dureux, whom the museum calls his “best and only friend.” When she died in March 1890, he painted Orpheus Weeping at the Tomb of Eurydice in her memory and designed her tomb on the same model as his own.

He painted the Bible’s wedding poem twice. He never married. His biographer Pierre-Louis Mathieu quotes him saying that “marriage extinguishes the artist.”

He painted the jewelled East. He never went further east than Italy. The only trips abroad in his museum’s chronology are Italy, in 1841 and again in 1857–59, and Belgium and Holland in 1888, when he is recorded at the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem. The scholar Aditi Gupta traces his India and Persia to Mughal albums in the national library in Paris, and the animals for one of his big projects to the zoo at the Jardin des Plantes.

He’s often called a recluse. He was also the emperor’s house guest. Huysmans called him “a mystic shut up in the heart of Paris.” The same man spent a week with Napoleon III at the Palais de Compiègne in 1865, joined the National Guard in 1870 at 44 until rheumatism disabled his right arm, sat in the Académie des Beaux-Arts and ran a teaching studio.

Grudges and prophecies. Gustave Boulanger beat him in the 1849 Prix de Rome final, and in 1882 the Académie chose Boulanger over him; in 1888 Moreau was finally elected to the Académie in Boulanger’s seat. In 1878 Zola called his talent “so dazzling that one does not know where to put him” and predicted that he “has had no master and will have no disciple”; from 1892 Moreau taught Henri Matisse, Albert Marquet and Henri Manguin, future Fauves whose flat slabs of wild colour are about as far from his jewelled detail as painting gets, and Georges Rouault. And his old friend Edgar Degas, according to the poet Paul Valéry, said Moreau “wants to make us believe that the gods wore watch chains.” Degas was still needling him at the funeral in April 1898: Moreau, he is said to have told Robert de Montesquiou, was one of those men who “always begin by drawing back their feet, for fear someone will step on them.”

The painter of ancient dreams found his fans among the moderns. Huysmans praised his art for fleeing “far from the excremental ideas secreted by a whole people,” and the poet Henri de Régnier wrote in 1894 that he couldn’t stop looking at the small, very correct painter, “for he has lived with the gods.” Long after his death he found fans among the Surrealists, and Salvador Dalí, the museum reports, is said to have exclaimed on a visit, “But it’s Papa!”

He painted a church’s Way of the Cross and hid his name. In 1862–63 he painted all fourteen Stations of the Cross for the new church of Notre-Dame in Decazeville, a mining town in southern France, and left them unsigned, according to his museum, “for fear of being associated with the painters of the Saint-Sulpice quarter,” Paris’s trade in mass-produced church art. Marcel Proust knew whose they were and slipped them into his unfinished novel Jean Santeuil as “admirable paintings by Gustave Moreau,” but in Decazeville they hung for about a century without his name; local accounts credit an art teacher with rediscovering them in 1964. The painter of Salome’s dance put fourteen Stations of the Cross in a working parish church and left his name off every one.

“The Hammer’s Salome took seven years to paint.” The Hammer Museum dates it 1874–76.

“The Los Angeles Salome is the ‘Tattooed Salome.’” The famous web of ink ornament is on a different, unfinished canvas of 1874 in the Musée Gustave Moreau in Paris, which Moreau drew over later.

“Moreau wrote, ‘I believe only in what I do not see.’” This line is widely quoted, but we couldn’t trace it to a dated text in his writings, so treat it as unverified until someone produces the page.

“Breton’s famous line comes from L’Art magique.” It first appeared in a 1960 preface and was reprinted in Breton’s Le Surréalisme et la peinture (1965).

Visio Divina is Latin for “divine seeing”: praying with a picture alongside a passage of Scripture. It works like reading the Bible slowly, except you begin with your eyes. Try it with King David, which you can also play as a puzzle.

1. Look. Give the painting a slow minute before you think about it. Find the old king on his throne, then the angel on the steps at his feet. Let your eye go wherever it wants after that.
2. Meditate. Read 2 Samuel 23:2 slowly, twice: “The Spirit of the LORD spoke through me; His word was on my tongue.” Ask what you would want to be able to say at the end of your own life.
3. Pray. David is claiming a prophet’s inspiration, and your words are not Scripture; still, thank God for the times His word has reached someone through you, and ask Him to keep it on your tongue.
4. Contemplate. Stop talking and sit with the old king in the quiet, trusting that a life given to God is not wasted.

How many Bible paintings did Gustave Moreau paint?

We haven’t found a published count. His house-museum alone displays about 1,200 paintings, watercolours and cartoons and more than 4,000 drawings, with over 9,000 more drawings and tracings in storage, many of them unfinished. Our collection holds 34 of his Bible and saint pictures.

What is Gustave Moreau’s most famous painting?

Probably his Salome. The oil Salome Dancing before Herod and the watercolour The Apparition caused a stir at the Paris Salon of 1876, and Huysmans’s 1884 novel À rebours made them famous.

Was Gustave Moreau religious?

He painted Bible subjects all his life and had a church funeral at La Trinité in Paris, but his private beliefs are hard to pin down. The Metropolitan Museum describes him as not a practising Christian, drawn to the saints by his belief in the spiritual value of art.

Where can I see Gustave Moreau’s paintings?

The Musée Gustave Moreau at 14 rue de La Rochefoucauld in Paris, his own house and studio, holds the largest collection. Others hang in the Musée d’Orsay and the Petit Palais in Paris, the National Gallery in London, Harvard Art Museums, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo.

Who were Gustave Moreau’s students?

At the École des Beaux-Arts, from 1892 to 1898, his pupils included Henri Matisse, Georges Rouault, Albert Marquet and Henri Manguin.

Did Gustave Moreau ever marry?

No. His closest friend for about thirty years was Alexandrine Dureux, whom his museum calls his “best and only friend.” She died in 1890.

What is Symbolism in art?

Symbolism was a late-nineteenth-century movement that painted dreams, myths and inner states rather than everyday life, as a reaction against realism. Moreau was one of its leading figures.