Les Lyres mortes

1888–1898 · Luogo di lavoro

Paris

1891–1898

Moreau’s atelier: about 125 students

Between 1891 and 1898 about 125 students passed through Moreau’s studio, and his class attracted the most progressive and adventurous of them. He made no attempt to impose his views, encouraged their own ideas, invited them to his home on Sunday afternoons (though not into his studio) and took them to the Louvre, unheard of at the École; Matisse called showing them the way to the museum an almost revolutionary attitude. Georges Rouault, already a student at the École, was quickly recognised by Moreau as an exceptional talent.

1891–1898

Matisse accepted without an examination: the making of the Fauves

Matisse had been denied admission to the École des Beaux-Arts, but Moreau saw him drawing in the school’s public courtyard and invited him to join his class, exempting him from the entrance examination. Matisse soon became the central figure among a faction of students in Moreau’s studio that developed into the Fauves.

1895

Turns his townhouse into a museum

After finishing “Jupiter and Semele” Moreau began his last great project, a museum in his own townhouse, to make his art accessible to all and to ensure it would be preserved for future generations. He sold few works in his lifetime: only three were bought by French museums and none by foreign ones.

18 April 1898

His last instructions and the bequest to the state

Moreau died of stomach cancer and was buried in his parents’ tomb at the Cimetière de Montmartre. He left instructions that his death was not to be announced in the press, that his funeral was to be very small and simple and that any flowers were to be placed on the grave of Alexandrine Dureux; he bequeathed his townhouse and studio, with nearly 1,200 paintings and watercolours and over 10,000 drawings, to the state to be converted into a museum.

18 aprile 1898

Died