Gustave Moreau's St George and the Dragon

      Gustave Moreau was a French painter and one of the leading Symbolist artists. He was a pupil of Chassiriau and was influenced by his master's exotic Romanticism, but Moreau went far beyond him in his feeling for the bizarre and developed a style that is highly distinctive in subject and technique. His preference was for mystically intense images evoking long-dead civilizations and mythologies, treated with an extraordinary sensuousness, his paint was encrusted and jewel-like. In 1892 he became a professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and proved an inspired teacher, bringing out his pupils' individual talents rather than trying to impose ideas on them. His pupils included Marquet and Matisse, but his favorite was Rouault.
      This late work is one of the artist's rare completed oils. The design is based on a drawing that Moreau had produced about twenty years earlier. The figures of the horse and the dragon are reminiscent of those of Raphael, but the painting is otherwise a more abstract and ornamental rendering of the legendary subject.
      The haloed figure of the saint recalls works of the early Renaissance that Moreau would have seen in Italy, notably those of Carpaccio and Crivelli. The figure of the princess with her hands folded in prayer in the right background, and the visionary Gothic castle in the distance, have been compared to those seen in eastern miniatures.