Perseus and Andromeda

Andromeda, chained at the ankle, languidly awaits her fate as a sacrifice to a sea monster. Her sensuous body dominates the composition and her liberator, Perseus, is only lightly delineated in the sky. He holds the Gorgon's head on his shield which will shortly turn the monster into stone. Gustave Moreau's subjects were exclusively taken from classical mythology or the Bible and the large paintings he exhibited in the mid-1860s at the Paris Salon gained him considerable success. He painted with a sumptuous richness; his larger works have elaborately encrusted surfaces built up from many layers of pigment. The poetry and imaginative power of his work particularly appealed to men of letters and Joris-Karl Huysmans wrote in his novel À rebours of “this great artist, this mystical pagan, this seer, who could conjure up in the everyday world of Paris such visions and magical apotheoses of other ages'.