“Salomé dancing before Herod”
Today, one from the founder of the Symbolism art movement…
This oil on canvas painting, titled “Salomé dancing before Herod”, is by the French artist, Gustave Moreau. Moreau completed this in 1876 after working on it, and other variants of it, for seven years. Many believe it to be his most important work. Most of Moreau’s art subject focuses on stories around women, usually depicting them as either femme-fatales or as innocent virgins.
This painting depicts a scene from the New Testament in the gospels of Mark 6:17-29 and Matthew 14:3-11, which tells the Biblical story of the death of John the Baptist. In the story, Herodias, Salomé’s mother, is angry at John the Baptist for speaking out against her marriage to King Herod. John the Baptist’s issue was that Herodias was originally the wife of Herod’s deceased brother and thought it inappropriate for her to marry her dead husband’s brother.
In turn, Herodias asks her daughter, Salomé, to dance provocatively for her stepfather, King Herod, at his birthday feast. Salomé does this. In this painting, Moreau depicts her in an ornate dress standing on the tip of her toes. King Herod is sitting on a throne with an executioner to his left. The king is so impressed with Salomé’s dancing, that after her performance, he offers her any wish she would like. After speaking with her mother, Salomé, asks for the head of John the Baptist on a platter. King Herod hesitantly obliges.
This is arguably Moreau’s most famous and important painting. In it, he masterfully blends cultural decorative motifs together, and includes stylistic inspiration from Turkey, Spain, Egypt, Greece, China, and Rome.
Salomé was a popular femme-fatale character in Europe during the late nineteenth century. Numerous artists painted her, and Oscar Wilde wrote a play about her. Moreau himself did several versions of this painting in the Apparition series. These depicted Salomé in a similar pose and pointing to a floating apparition of the head of John the Baptist.
There is a watercolor painting of Salomé, from circa 1875, in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that is currently attributed to Moreau. However, there are some doubts that it was actually done by Moreau, as the painting lacks the moody edge that most of his pieces have.
“Salomé dancing before Herod” is currently in the permanent collections of the Armand Hammer Museum at UCLA in California, the United States.
For more on Gustave Moreau, please visit his short biography here.
You can find more artists to learn about here.
