Musée Gustave Moreau
A nineteenth-century home and studio bequeathed to the French nation by Gustave Moreau (1826-1898).
Similar studio museums...
- Maison familiale d'Henri Matisse, France - the childhood home of Moreau's pupil at the École des Beaux-Arts, Henri Matisse (1869-1954)
- Leighton House, United Kingdom - home to Frederic, Lord Leighton (1830-1896) and his art collection, complete with a double-height studio
Feature List
- Guided Tours
- Workshops
- Artist workshop
Gustave Moreau first rose to fame with the exhibition in the 1864 Salon of his Oedipe et le sphinx, though, from the 1880s onwards, he increasingly shrank from public exhibition. This house in Nouvelle Athens, which had been his childhood home, became his increasing focus during this period of his life. In 1895, he commissioned the young architect Albert Lafon to convert it from hôtel particulier into a museum including a dedicated gallery space, private domestic quarters and studio. The latter extended over the second and third floor, connected by a small staircase, providing space for hundreds of paintings and thousands of drawings.
In 1897, Moreau decided to bequeath the house and its contents to the French nation, in the hope that its preservation in total would 'allow the public to appreciate the culmination of the artist's lifelong work and labour'. When it opened to the public in 1903, the Musée Moreau had in its collection some 14,000 works. The museum appears today much as it did then, and includes a major collection of paintings both by Moreau and his contemporaries.
