How to Judge an Obscure and Odd Museum: No Mouse Mats for Sale in the Gift Shop - Gustave Moreau Museum, Paris

Gustave Moreau Museum, Paris

Gustave Moreau’s Museum seems weird and stuffy. You start by going up a carpeted stair to where the French symbolist painter (1826-1898) lived and died. It’s claustrophobic, especially the salon in which the aged painter received those coming to buy his works once he was too old to climb the stairs up to his studio. Old newspapers are folded on the table. The walls close in.

Then you climb the spiral staircase and the space is immense and extraordinary. Under vast windows are curtains which you pull back to reveal thousands of drawings stored in wonderful wooden display cases. It’s the details; the staircase, the massive stove, the wonderful floor that delight. As for the
art, Moreau liked to paint vast canvases depicting rosy pink nudes hugging well-endowed bulls. His main focus was the illustration of Christian and mythological figures but their perversity and sauciness might have been part of the attraction. When the museum opened in the artist’s home and studio only five years after he died, it was mobbed. Now, it is seems only art students who sit quietly drawing from the master who taught Matisse know about it.

Moreau was extremely prolific and there’s a whole other studio up above this one, which you reach by climbing the most exquisite staircase in Paris.

Musee Gustave Moreau,
14 rue de la Rochefoucauld, 9th arrondissement.