Reading myth

Gustave Moreau

Oedipus and the Sphinx

1864

Oil on canvas, 206.4 × 104.8 cm · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The painting that made Moreau’s name at the Paris Salon of 1864, and a major influence on later Symbolist artists and writers such as Odilon Redon and Oscar Wilde. Compare it with Ingres’s calm version of 1808.

• The Sphinx, woman-headed with blue wings, lion claws and a serpent tail, confronts Oedipus at close quarters.
• Remains of earlier victims lie at the bottom: a hand, a foot, a crown.
• An ornate urn sits on the column at right.
• Bequeathed to the Met in 1920.

Moreau turns Ingres’s contest of reason into a tense standoff between man and monster, the Symbolist reading of the same myth.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · CC0