Dreaming the past

Gustave Moreau (1826-1898) was a prolific artist (the Musée national Gustave Moreau alone holds some 1,200 paintings and watercolors, and over 10,000 drawings), who zealously pursued popular intellectual studies of his time. His work was steeped in history, classics, poetry, and music in addition to art and aesthetics. The wide range of his intellectual and aesthetic pursuits resulted in an artistic process which embraced a universal eclecticism that has much to teach us about the cultural production of knowledge during the nineteenth century.