Les Chimères (painting)
| Les Chimères | |
|---|---|
| Artist | Gustave Moreau |
| Year | 1884 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 236 cm × 204 cm (92.9 in × 80.3 in) |
| Location | Musée national Gustave Moreau, Paris |
Les Chimères or The Chimaeras is an unfinished painting by the French Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau (6 April 1826 – 18 April 1898) executed in 1884. It depicts a large forest scene wherein various nude women are associated with sundry figures from classical and medieval mythology –not only the titular chimeras, but also centaurs, winged creatures, fawns, minotaurs, etc. The painting is a philosophical meditation on what Moreau saw as the elemental nature of Woman, depicting the internal yearnings and dreams of women (des chimères being a French idiom indicating unrealistic dreams) through complex mythological symbolism. Moreau abandoned the work shortly after his mother’s death to work on the darker polyptych La Vie de l'Humanité, considered one of his masterpieces.
Executed on a 2.36m by 2.04m canvas, Les Chimères is in the Musée national Gustave Moreau at 14 Rue de La Rochefoucauld, Paris. The scene, like many of Moreau’s other pieces, is in nature –a forest—but filled with figures that blend with and complete the scenery. While still adhering to Neoclassical conventions of form, Moreau fills the canvas with creations of his own imagination. A nude woman being courted by a centaur is the focal point, while other women and their respective chimères, here taken in the meaning of “fantasies” or “dreams,” not only literally, fill out the piece. The fact that the painting was abandoned means that many, if not most of these figures are only sketched out and not left a pale white, with the sky being the same white –this creates a haze in the middle of the piece and also gives the effect of Classical marble statuary to the various figures.
The theme of the chimera is originally from Classical mythology, where the chimera was a fearsome fire-breathing beast with the heads of a lion, a goat, and a dragon, the last one attached to its tail. The chimera romped about Lycia, spreading havoc, until slain by the hero Bellerophon on his winged steed, the Pegasus. In the Middle Ages, however, the chimera took a new meaning, representing the perverse forces of the Devil as in Dante’s Inferno and, later, hypocrisy and fraud, as in the Iconologia of Cesare Ripa.¹ In France, une chimère had the additional idiomatic meaning of an illusion or delusion; all these various connotations no doubt influenced Moreau, who began no less than half a dozen paintings with variations on the theme.
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