Gustave Moreau’s visionary works speak to an obsession with the otherworldly, the macabre, and the life of the imagination, making him one of the most fascinating artists of nineteenth century. Guided partly by his unusual religious faith, called Neo-Platonism, stressing the imperfection and impermanence of the physical world, Moreau captured the products of his imagination with precision. Moreau believed that by doing so, he was allowing divine vision to speak through his brush. In Moreau’s art, moments depicted from biblical or mythical narratives are populated with ambiguous visual symbols, with divine and mortal beings locked in conflict, and with strange visions of venereal suffering.

In an era when paintings of mythological subjects often meant sentimentalized renderings or cold recitations of classical sculpture, Moreau was a pioneer with his intensely personal, fantastical, even perverse, interpretations. His works from the 1860s anticipate the Symbolist work of the 1880s, exploring interior consciousness rather than exterior observation. A solitary, wealthy intellectual, Moreau spent most of his life in Paris. His home in Montmartre is now a national museum, where most of the preparatory drawings and unfinished paintings are kept.

Helen of Troy had interested Moreau since his youth; in 1854 he executed an Abduction of Helen in the tradition of Poussin. The fatal beauty reappears in Moreau’s horrific monumental painting, now lost, exhibited at the Salon of 1880, in which she stands on the walls of Troy, presiding over the mass of victims of the war she caused. Helen, daughter of Zeus and Leda, married to Menelaus, King of Sparta, was, according to Homer’s Iliad the most beautiful woman in the world. The Trojan prince Paris’s abduction of Helen precipitated the Trojan War. After a fruitless ten-year siege, the city fell to the ruse of the Trojan Horse. The Greeks slaughtered the Trojans and desecrated their temples. The discovery of the supposed ruins at Troy by Heinrich Schliemann in 1871, surely inspired artists and writers, already fascinated by mythology and distant places.

The present Hélène Glorifiée dated 1896, marks the culmination of Moreau’s developing thoughts on, and ambitions for, this topic. The small prototype from 1887 in the Musée Gustave Moreau, depicts Helen as equally fatal, but less malevolent than in the other pictorial incarnations; a mysterious enchantress who captures all mankind in her spell. The subject, taken from the rarely-read second part of Goethe’s Faust of 1832, requires extensive knowledge of Greek mythology. In the play, Faust, commanded by Mephisto to bring him the archetype of beauty, summons the spirit of Helen from Hades. Falling in love with Helen, Faust fathers her winged child Euphorion, who charms all with his beauty and gift for music before dying young and calling his mother back with him to Hades.

Helen, in a theatrical posture against a symbolic décor, no longer designates an episode of this myth; she is an innocent, whose beauty provoked the conflict through no fault of her own. Although in previous iterations presented as melancholic and resigned upon seeing the soldiers who had died for her beauty, Helen now is portrayed as a guiltless heroine. She is surrounded and glorified by her eternal admirers, the warrior on the left, the poet and king on the right, and her son at her feet. By reducing the number of victims to a symbolic triumvirate–warrior, prince, poet–representing combat, power and art, Helen is elevated to an iconic representation of majestic beauty. The vanquished are not dead or dying, simply subservient and in awe.

The complexity of the literal iconography notwithstanding, this mature work also draws upon a multitude of other sources for its imagery, which come together in a work that stands as one of the very best examples of Moreau’s unique strand of Symbolism. His rigorous academic draftsmanship combines aspects of the Virgin’s Assumption and Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, while the lotus flower that Helen holds in her hand is a traditional Buddhist symbol of purity and divine birth. These various elements are held together in a strongly vertical composition, the smaller figures and their bejeweled, flowing accessories, echoing those of Helen. There are other symbols in the work, but trying to fathom the meaning of each is to miss the effect of the whole, for they principally serve as accessories to reinforce a dominant, symbolic idea.

The intense and shimmering colors of the thickly applied gouache give Hélène Glorifiée a palpable depth and richness. The paint describing Helen’s long cloak has been combed through while wet with long, single filament brushstrokes, creating the finely ridged texture of combed hair, turning her garment into an iridescent extension of the golden plaits drooping off her shoulders. The starry orbs at the lower left and upper right are applied in abundant globs of paint, surrounded by rays of shell gold, historically made and stored in a shallow shell such as a clamshell. An expensive product, shell gold consists of powdered gold leaf mixed with gum Arabic, traditionally used in icons and illuminated manuscripts. Moreau’s use of gold, arduous to use effectively, conveys the importance he placed on the commission and his abilities as a superb draftsman and watercolorist. The intense blues, embellished with a hallucinogenic jewel-like surface akin to cloisonné enamel, create an image rising far beyond the kind of hazy mysticism prevalent in fin-de-siècle Paris.

Commissioned by the Comtesse Grefullhe, who promoted artists such as Whistler and Rodin, and frequented Moreau’s studio, Hélène Glorifiée must have been widely admired in her Parisian Salon at the end of the nineteenth century. The Comtesse also owned Moreau’s Salomé au Jardin, Sainte Elisabeth, Saint Jean-Baptiste given to her by her husband Henry when their daughter Elaine was born in 1882.[1] Delivered to the Comtesse by the Moreau’s friend and patron, the important Parisian collector of Impressionism and Japanese art Charles Ephrussi (1849-1905)[2], the fate of this remarkable work would take a tragic turn when it was confiscated in Paris during World War II and transferred to Schloss Neuschwanstein in Germany, a depot for Nazi plunder from the occupied territories. Restituted to the owner, the art dealer George Wildenstein after the war, the Moreau would have yet another illustrious owner: Florence Gould, the wealthy New York socialite and patron of the arts, who may have identified with the ravishing beauty of Helen.

[1] Anne de Cossé Brissac, La Comtesse Greffulhe, Paris 1991, p. 105

[2] Charles Ephrussi’s collection of netsuke is the protagonist in Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010).