Costume Design for Glycère from the Final Act of the Opera Sapho by Charles Gounod

Date

1883

Creator

<span>In 1883 an administrator of the Paris Opéra asked Moreau to advise on the costume designs for a new production of Charles Gounod's Sapho. Moreau's more than twenty drawings and watercolor designs for the opera testify to his intense interest in the project. Art historian Genevieve Lacambre has noted that the Opéra administration found the artist's original ideas too complex, and Moreau consequently produced a second series of designs. A drawing by Opéra designer Eugène Lacoste in the Opéra's library shows how Lacoste attempted to reuse one of Moreau's designs. The medium of watercolor played an especially critical role in Moreau's body work; the artist used it throughout his career both for numerous preliminary studies and for important, carefully finished works. This elaborately detailed costume design for Glyc<span style="font-size:13pt">è</span>re, intended for the final act of the opera, shows the light, transparent washes Moreau often employed, in addition to the more opaque touches of paint that provide a unique, dense, jewel-like quality to the surface of so many of the artist's oil and watercolors.<br/><br/>from Spiro, Nineteenth-Century French Drawings (Notre Dame, 2007)</span>