wide--too wide, one is tempted to
add; and thus by a conscious act of the will he originated an art that
recalls an antique chryselephantine statue, a being rigid with
precious gems, pasted with strange colours, something with mineral
eyes without the breath of life--contemporary life--yet charged with
its author's magnetism, bearing a charmed existence, that might come
from a cold, black magic; monstrous, withal possessing a strange
feverish beauty, as Flaubert's Salammbo is beautiful, in a remote,
exotic way.

However, it is not fair to deny Moreau human sympathies. There are
many of his paintings and drawings, notably the latter, that show him
as possessing heart. His handling of his medium though heavy is never
timid, and at times is masterly. Delacroix inspired many of his
landscape backgrounds, as Ingres gave him the proportions of his
female figures. You continually encounter variations of Ingres, the
sweet, serene line, the tapering feet and hands. Some critics have
discerned the toe forms of Perugino; but such mechanical measurements
strain our notion of eclecticism. Certainly Moreau studied Bellini,
Mantegna, and Da Vinci without ever attaining the freedom and
distinction of any of them. His colour, too, is often hard and cold,
though not in the sumptuous surfaces of his fabrics; there Venetian
splendour is apparent. He can be fiery and insipid, metallic and
morbid; his Orientalism is at times transposed from the work of his
old friend the painter Chasseriau into the key of a brilliant, if
pompous rhetoric.

THE MOREAU MUSEUM

This herculean attempt at reassembling many styles in a unique style
that would best express a certain frozen symbolism was the amiable
mania his life long of Moreau. He compelled the spirits to come to his
bidding. The moment you cross the threshold of his house the spell
begins to work. It is dissipated by the daylight of Paris, but while
you are under the roof of the museum you can't escape it. Nor is it as
with Rossetti, a mystic opiate, or with Wiertz, a madman's delirious
fancy. Moreau was a philosophic poet, and though he disclaimed being a
"literary" painter, it is literature that is the mainspring of his
elevated and decorative art. Open at random the catalogue full of
quotations from the painter's pen and you encounter such titles as
Leda and the Swan, treated with poetic restraint; Jupiter and Semele,
Tyrtaeus Singing During the Combat, St. Elizabeth and the Mira