“Salomé dancing before Herod”
Today, one from the founder of the Symbolism art movement…
This oil on canvas piece, titled “Salomé dancing before Herod”, is by the French Symbolism artist, Gustave Moreau. Moreau completed this painting in 1876 after working on it, and many 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 this story, Herodias, Salomé’s mom, 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, Heriodas 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 depicted sitting on a throne with an executioner to his left. King Herod is so impressed with Salomé’s dancing that he offers her any wish she would like afterwards. 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 during the late 19th century in Europe. Numerous artists have depicted her in their paintings 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 also a watercolor painting of Salomé that dates to 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.
