Gustave Moreau - Paintings

Gustave Moreau was both secretive and a master. When French author Huysmans reported on his visit to the painter, he wrote: “Mr. Gustave Moreau is an extraordinary artist, unique. He is a mystic locked up in the middle of Paris in a cell into which even the noise of everyday life that nevertheless beats furiously at the doors of the cloister does not penetrate. Thrown in ecstasy, he sees the resplendent fairy-like visions, the apotheoses of other times.” 

Around the same time, Moreau received novelist and mystic Joséphin Péladan, who revered him as the greatest living French painter. However, Moreau refused to show him the paintings he was working on; only those paintings already hanging on his walls, he could see. Moreau said that 200 paintings were in progress and that he daily added details to some, as and when he needed to. Only when a painting was complete, was Moreau willing to reveal it, though – preferably – he wanted to see his entire oeuvre to be unveiled all at once, upon his death. (Via)