Oedipus and the Sphinx
Description from the Met Museum:
The legendary Greek prince Oedipus confronts the malevolent Sphinx, who torments travelers with a riddle: What creature walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening? Remains of victims who answered incorrectly litter the foreground. (The solution is the human, who crawls as a baby, strides upright in maturity, and uses a cane in old age.) Moreau made his mark with this painting at the Paris Salon of 1864. Despite the growing prominence of depictions of everyday life, he portrayed biblical, mythological, and imagined stories. His otherworldly imagery attracted a younger generation that included Odilon Redon and Oscar Wilde.
Catalogue Entry from the Met Museum:
The Painting: In a rocky mountain pass, a heroic male nude encounters a figure with the head and pointed bare breasts of a woman, the ornate blue feathered wings of a bird, the clawed arms and legs of a lion, and the tail of a serpent. The male figure holds a long, ornate spear with his left hand, and a chalice decorated with a snake and four griffons sits atop a pedestal beside him. An enigmatic hand, foot, and human bone riddle the foreground. While such a scene may seem foreign today, nineteenth-century viewers of Gustave Moreau’s (French, 1826–1898) painting were quite familiar with the subject.
The picture shows the famous confrontation between the adventurer Oedipus and the mythic predatory monster, the Sphinx, memorably told by the great Greek tragedian, Sophocles (498-406 BC). The creature plagued the city of Thebes, accosting travelers and killing everyone who could not answer her riddle: "What goes on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three in the evening?" Oedipus defeated the Sphinx by answering the riddle: it is man, himself, who crawls as an infant, rises to two feet as an adult, and often requires the aid of a walking stick as a "third leg" in old age, the "evening" of life. In responding correctly, Oedipus saved his own life and all of Thebes, and became the city’s king. Moreau painted the subject several times. This first version, from 1864, was shown in the Salon of that year, where it made Moreau’s name by winning a medal, spawning much discussion in the press, and finding an immediate purchaser in Prince Napoleon. The artist returned to the subject on multiple occasions in the 1880s.
Moreau’s interpretation of the mythological theme relied heavily on that of his predecessor, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780–1867), in his Oedipus Explaining the Enigma of the Sphinx (see fig. 1 above). Moreau would have seen Ingres’s version of the scene when it was exhibited in Paris in 1846, the year Moreau was admitted to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts at age twenty and when he was studying with the Neoclassical painter François Edouard Picot (1786–1868). Most likely, Moreau would have seen the picture again when Ingres exhibited it in his large retrospective at the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1855. About 1860 Moreau made four small drawings on the back of a page in a book he owned that shift compositionally from Ingres’s Oedipus to his own. (The cartoon after Ingres is reproduced in Holten 1957.) Both painters depicted the moment when Oedipus confronts the monster on a mountainside outside Thebes. But whereas Ingres included the foot of a dead victim and the skull and ribs of a prior contender at solving the Sphinx’s riddle at bottom left, in his final oil Moreau was more extreme in his inclusion of morbid details, reveling in the green, rotting flesh of her prior victim’s foot and dirty toenails, an earlier victim’s ribcage, and the representation of a hand with grimy fingernails that clutches a rock as if holding on to the last gasps of life. Where Ingres’s Oedipus self-confidently dominates the encounter, Moreau’s Oedipus remains still as the Sphinx lunges aggressively toward him, her long, curved claws scratching Oedipus’s chest. Where Ingres’s hero displays naturalistic muscularity, Moreau’s Oedipus presents his long legs and the muscular ridge where his abdomen meets his hip in a classic contrapposto pose that highlights the thin ideal body type common in later nineteenth-century European painting and sculpture. Although Moreau’s Oedipus leans away from the monster, he courageously stares her down.
While sources for the Sphinx’s pose have been found in such diverse places as a poem by Heinrich Heine (Holten 1957) and the Greek etymology of the term "sphinx," which means "to clutch, embrace, or cling to" (Dorra 1973, citing a paper written on the subject in 1863 by Michel Bréal), it seems more likely that Moreau was looking at antique precedents. Kaplan (1982) noted that Moreau traced an image from a copy of the Magasin Pittoresque of 1834 in his own library that illustrated a composite creature related to the Sphinx with a lion’s body and wings; he also identified sources in various antiquities in the Louvre for the body of the Sphinx (see below) and, for the posture, singled out a Persian motif of a lion from Persepolis. Dorra suggested that the figure of Oedipus could be derived from the design of a Bithynian coin of Nicomedes II depicting Zeus leaning on a staff with an eagle on his right (fig. 2). Moret (2000) found another ancient source for Oedipus’s pose in an Attic funerary relief. Andrea Mantegna’s Saint Sebastian (ca. 1478–80?, Musée du Louvre, Paris) is also often cited as a source for the figure of Oedipus. While the Italian painting was not acquired by the Louvre until 1910, it was already well-known in France through engraving, and the critic Jules Claretie (1864) noted the painting’s stylistic debt to the same Italian Renaissance master. Finally, Kaplan (1982) also cited possible sources for Oedipus in the Athena Farnese, a major sculptural monument in Naples, and Giovanni Bellini’s San Giobbe Altarpiece (ca. 1487) in the Accademia in Venice. Moreau copied the image of the urn with four griffons, seen at right, from folios of Piranesi engravings he had inherited from his father; the column was inspired by another print from the same album of a marble funerary monument (Lacambre 1999). Moreau adjusted the column in the final painting but kept the urn close to its source. (The Piranesi print is reproduced in Lacambre 1999, p. 80, fig. 1.)
Dorra proposed the following iconographic associations for objects in the painting: the crown and purple cloth as emblems of political power, the golden laurel as representative of official academic honors, the fig tree at the left of the Sphinx as a traditional symbol of sin, and the jewelry of the Sphinx as a symbol for material wealth. Kaplan (1982) associated the butterfly near the ornate chalice with the soul and the snake coiled around the pedestal with death, noting that the butterfly’s escape from the snake echoes the laurel as a symbol of victory.
Context: The context for Ingres’s and Moreau’s versions of the scene differed substantially. According to Rosenblum (Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, New York, 1967, p. 80), Ingres’s picture conformed to "the growing Romantic taste for the grotesque and the sublime that, in France, was to reach its climax in the works of Géricault and Delacroix." Moreau’s painting, produced nearly forty years later, has been seen to relate to a growing fear of socially and politically powerful women among the French populace at mid-century. (See Heller 1981, pp. 8–9, 11–13 and Mathews 1999, pp. 98, 107–11, 113–14, 259 n. 27, among others.) Politician and philosopher Pierre Joseph Proudhon’s (1809–1865) anti-feminist writings, ranging from the late 1840s until the 1875 posthumous publication of his unfinished treatise La Pornocratie ou les femmes dans les temps modernes, cautioned that men must subordinate women, or cultural degeneracy would follow. Moreau’s picture may allude to the same concerns.
Moreau, himself, described the subject of the painting in his private notebook with commentaries on his paintings, emphasizing the ultimate victory of man over female monster: "The painter imagines man as having attained the serious and momentous hour of his life and finding himself in the presence of the eternal enigma. She clutches him in an embrace with her terrible claws—but the pilgrim, noble and calm in his moral power, regards her without trembling. She is the earthly chimera, vile as all matter and attractive nonetheless—represented by this charming head and the wings of the ideal, but with the body of a monster, of the carnivore who rips apart and annihilates. But the strong and firm soul defies the monster’s bestialities. Man, [strong] and firm, defies the enervating and brutal blows of matter. With his eyes fixed on the ideal, he proceeds confidently towards his goal after having trampled her under his feet." (Moreau, Notebook II, III, 21, in Kaplan 1974, p. 142, translated in Heller 1981) Elements such as the snake and the fig tree placed in proximity to the female Sphinx link women and temptation; similarly, a bit later in the century, the "New Woman," the freshly independent woman anathema to conservative French society, was often represented as Medusa, with snakes in her hair.
Moreau excelled in images of manslaughter and encounters involving women and beasts, of which the story of Oedipus and the Sphinx is a prime example. He followed his success with Oedipus and the Sphinx by exhibiting Jason (fig. 3) the next year, in which Medea’s hand on Jason’s shoulder and her grasp on the magic potion that led to his slaying of the dragon at their feet both convey her power over the hero. The Sphinx atop the column next to them reinforces Medea’s role in the death of the dragon. That same year, Moreau also produced Orpheus, in which the finding of the protagonist’s head by a young girl reminds viewers of Orpheus’s gruesome dismemberment by maenads, wild female followers of the god Dionysus (fig. 4). These paintings have been related to anxieties about the changing social position of women that only increased in France by the mid-1870s, when Moreau depicted the biblical femme fatale Salomé (see, for example, fig. 5), who demanded and received the head of Saint John the Baptist in exchange for her seductive dancing (Heller 1981; Mathews 1999); other Academic painters, such as Henri Regnault, also embraced this subject (see, for example, The Met, 16.95). Moreau’s depictions of the mythological themes of the Sphinx, Medea, and Orpheus inspired many Symbolist artists who followed him, like Fernand Khnopff, to undertake their own versions of the subjects.
Moreau’s interest in mythology as a powerful means of conveying ideas through symbols and emblem-laden figures has been discussed extensively by Lacambre (1999), Cooke (2003), Allan (2008), and Larson (2015). Larson argued that the present painting "functions as allegory, with Oedipus, representing the soul of man, treading over the corpses of the material world, all the while resisting the temptations of its seductive side, represented by the female Sphinx. According to this interpretation, Moreau’s figures correspond to specific ideas." Larson noted that this interpretation was steeped in a theory of correspondences between material objects and spiritual ideas that was common in the later nineteenth century. Lacambre also contended that the encounter between Oedipus and the Sphinx encapsulated the opposing forces of good and evil, man and woman, and spiritual and material. Similarly, Allan discussed Moreau’s "emblematizing the equation Matter=Woman=Evil" in the Sphinx (a role that the femme fatale would inhabit soon in Symbolist art), pointed out that several period critics harped on the Sphinx’s "sexually predatory" nature, and termed Moreau’s reading of the myth "misogynistic."
Still other interpretations of the picture have included psychological readings. Paladilhe (1971), in a Freudian reading of Oedipus and the Sphinx, notes that Moreau’s father died just a few months before he began the painting, and argues that the artist projected onto the theme his unconscious desire to exorcise the castrating influence of his mother. It has also been suggested that this work symbolizes Moreau's struggle in choosing the life of an artist and giving up sensual gratification, and, similarly, that it presents an allegory of the artist ‘s own spiritual refusal of material temptations in his pursuit of idealism (Kaplan 1974; Allan 2008).
Studies for the Painting: Moreau made over thirty preparatory sketches for the painting over a two year period. In 1862, he began with studies of stuffed animals and birds in the Muséum d’histoire naturelle (Lacambre 1999). That same year, he received a student card to work in the galleries of anatomy, zoology, botany, geology, and minerology in the same museum, and an artist’s card to work in the Louvre. There, he studied works from antiquity that heavily influenced his archaizing style. In addition to working at the Louvre, he gained knowledge of antique precedents from books in the private library he shared with his father (Helma-Tisserent 1981 and Moret 2000).
Among the many studies for the picture reproduced in Kaplan 1974 are: a pencil study of ca. 1860 for Oedipus sketched into Moreau’s copy of Giovanni De Cavallerii’s Antiquarium Statuarum Urbis Romae (Rome, 1594) (no. 30); a watercolor of Oedipus and the Sphinx of ca. 1860 (no. 31); a first idea for the two figures together in pencil, pen, and ink, of 1861 (no. 29); an undated study for Oedipus, in pencil (no. 32); and an undated study for the Sphinx's wing, in pencil (no. 33), that reveals the artist’s close zoological study. An early sketch in the Musée national Gustave Moreau (fig. 6) shows the artist working out the poses of the Sphinx and Oedipus, whose hipshot stance would soon become more exaggerated. Close studies of the heads of both figures (figs. 7, 8) demonstrate the artist beginning to consider the texture of their hair. Moreau annotated a black chalk study for Oedipus’s body, telling himself to make the figure taller and his thighs longer ("plus haut/ cuisses plus longues") to reach ideal proportions (fig. 9); on the same sheet is what appears to be an image very close to that of the final Oedipus, but with short hair and a beard, squared for transfer to the canvas. In the squared drawing, the artist was directly quoting an antique source for the male figure. An undated pencil study (fig. 10) gives an overall presentation of the composition highly similar to The Met’s picture, but shows that the artist first placed the Sphinx’s chalice atop an ornate column with Ionian capitals to the left of the main figures, before switching it to the right side and changing the appearance of the column as well as the urn. (For other studies, see Lacambre 1999, nos. 28-4–5, 28-7–9, 28-10–12, 28-15–18.)
Source: Jane R. Becker 2016
Open Access
As part of the Met's Open Access policy, you can freely copy, modify and distribute this image, even for commercial purposes.
Œdipe et le sphinx
Description from the Met Museum:
The legendary Greek prince Oedipus confronts the malevolent Sphinx, who torments travelers with a riddle: What creature walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening? Remains of victims who answered incorrectly litter the foreground. (The solution is the human, who crawls as a baby, strides upright in maturity, and uses a cane in old age.) Moreau made his mark with this painting at the Paris Salon of 1864. Despite the growing prominence of depictions of everyday life, he portrayed biblical, mythological, and imagined stories. His otherworldly imagery attracted a younger generation that included Odilon Redon and Oscar Wilde.
Catalogue Entry from the Met Museum:
The Painting: In a rocky mountain pass, a heroic male nude encounters a figure with the head and pointed bare breasts of a woman, the ornate blue feathered wings of a bird, the clawed arms and legs of a lion, and the tail of a serpent. The male figure holds a long, ornate spear with his left hand, and a chalice decorated with a snake and four griffons sits atop a pedestal beside him. An enigmatic hand, foot, and human bone riddle the foreground. While such a scene may seem foreign today, nineteenth-century viewers of Gustave Moreau’s (French, 1826–1898) painting were quite familiar with the subject.
The picture shows the famous confrontation between the adventurer Oedipus and the mythic predatory monster, the Sphinx, memorably told by the great Greek tragedian, Sophocles (498-406 BC). The creature plagued the city of Thebes, accosting travelers and killing everyone who could not answer her riddle: "What goes on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three in the evening?" Oedipus defeated the Sphinx by answering the riddle: it is man, himself, who crawls as an infant, rises to two feet as an adult, and often requires the aid of a walking stick as a "third leg" in old age, the "evening" of life. In responding correctly, Oedipus saved his own life and all of Thebes, and became the city’s king. Moreau painted the subject several times. This first version, from 1864, was shown in the Salon of that year, where it made Moreau’s name by winning a medal, spawning much discussion in the press, and finding an immediate purchaser in Prince Napoleon. The artist returned to the subject on multiple occasions in the 1880s.
Moreau’s interpretation of the mythological theme relied heavily on that of his predecessor, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780–1867), in his Oedipus Explaining the Enigma of the Sphinx (see fig. 1 above). Moreau would have seen Ingres’s version of the scene when it was exhibited in Paris in 1846, the year Moreau was admitted to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts at age twenty and when he was studying with the Neoclassical painter François Edouard Picot (1786–1868). Most likely, Moreau would have seen the picture again when Ingres exhibited it in his large retrospective at the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1855. About 1860 Moreau made four small drawings on the back of a page in a book he owned that shift compositionally from Ingres’s Oedipus to his own. (The cartoon after Ingres is reproduced in Holten 1957.) Both painters depicted the moment when Oedipus confronts the monster on a mountainside outside Thebes. But whereas Ingres included the foot of a dead victim and the skull and ribs of a prior contender at solving the Sphinx’s riddle at bottom left, in his final oil Moreau was more extreme in his inclusion of morbid details, reveling in the green, rotting flesh of her prior victim’s foot and dirty toenails, an earlier victim’s ribcage, and the representation of a hand with grimy fingernails that clutches a rock as if holding on to the last gasps of life. Where Ingres’s Oedipus self-confidently dominates the encounter, Moreau’s Oedipus remains still as the Sphinx lunges aggressively toward him, her long, curved claws scratching Oedipus’s chest. Where Ingres’s hero displays naturalistic muscularity, Moreau’s Oedipus presents his long legs and the muscular ridge where his abdomen meets his hip in a classic contrapposto pose that highlights the thin ideal body type common in later nineteenth-century European painting and sculpture. Although Moreau’s Oedipus leans away from the monster, he courageously stares her down.
While sources for the Sphinx’s pose have been found in such diverse places as a poem by Heinrich Heine (Holten 1957) and the Greek etymology of the term "sphinx," which means "to clutch, embrace, or cling to" (Dorra 1973, citing a paper written on the subject in 1863 by Michel Bréal), it seems more likely that Moreau was looking at antique precedents. Kaplan (1982) noted that Moreau traced an image from a copy of the Magasin Pittoresque of 1834 in his own library that illustrated a composite creature related to the Sphinx with a lion’s body and wings; he also identified sources in various antiquities in the Louvre for the body of the Sphinx (see below) and, for the posture, singled out a Persian motif of a lion from Persepolis. Dorra suggested that the figure of Oedipus could be derived from the design of a Bithynian coin of Nicomedes II depicting Zeus leaning on a staff with an eagle on his right (fig. 2). Moret (2000) found another ancient source for Oedipus’s pose in an Attic funerary relief. Andrea Mantegna’s Saint Sebastian (ca. 1478–80?, Musée du Louvre, Paris) is also often cited as a source for the figure of Oedipus. While the Italian painting was not acquired by the Louvre until 1910, it was already well-known in France through engraving, and the critic Jules Claretie (1864) noted the painting’s stylistic debt to the same Italian Renaissance master. Finally, Kaplan (1982) also cited possible sources for Oedipus in the Athena Farnese, a major sculptural monument in Naples, and Giovanni Bellini’s San Giobbe Altarpiece (ca. 1487) in the Accademia in Venice. Moreau copied the image of the urn with four griffons, seen at right, from folios of Piranesi engravings he had inherited from his father; the column was inspired by another print from the same album of a marble funerary monument (Lacambre 1999). Moreau adjusted the column in the final painting but kept the urn close to its source. (The Piranesi print is reproduced in Lacambre 1999, p. 80, fig. 1.)
Dorra proposed the following iconographic associations for objects in the painting: the crown and purple cloth as emblems of political power, the golden laurel as representative of official academic honors, the fig tree at the left of the Sphinx as a traditional symbol of sin, and the jewelry of the Sphinx as a symbol for material wealth. Kaplan (1982) associated the butterfly near the ornate chalice with the soul and the snake coiled around the pedestal with death, noting that the butterfly’s escape from the snake echoes the laurel as a symbol of victory.
Context: The context for Ingres’s and Moreau’s versions of the scene differed substantially. According to Rosenblum (Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, New York, 1967, p. 80), Ingres’s picture conformed to "the growing Romantic taste for the grotesque and the sublime that, in France, was to reach its climax in the works of Géricault and Delacroix." Moreau’s painting, produced nearly forty years later, has been seen to relate to a growing fear of socially and politically powerful women among the French populace at mid-century. (See Heller 1981, pp. 8–9, 11–13 and Mathews 1999, pp. 98, 107–11, 113–14, 259 n. 27, among others.) Politician and philosopher Pierre Joseph Proudhon’s (1809–1865) anti-feminist writings, ranging from the late 1840s until the 1875 posthumous publication of his unfinished treatise La Pornocratie ou les femmes dans les temps modernes, cautioned that men must subordinate women, or cultural degeneracy would follow. Moreau’s picture may allude to the same concerns.
Moreau, himself, described the subject of the painting in his private notebook with commentaries on his paintings, emphasizing the ultimate victory of man over female monster: "The painter imagines man as having attained the serious and momentous hour of his life and finding himself in the presence of the eternal enigma. She clutches him in an embrace with her terrible claws—but the pilgrim, noble and calm in his moral power, regards her without trembling. She is the earthly chimera, vile as all matter and attractive nonetheless—represented by this charming head and the wings of the ideal, but with the body of a monster, of the carnivore who rips apart and annihilates. But the strong and firm soul defies the monster’s bestialities. Man, [strong] and firm, defies the enervating and brutal blows of matter. With his eyes fixed on the ideal, he proceeds confidently towards his goal after having trampled her under his feet." (Moreau, Notebook II, III, 21, in Kaplan 1974, p. 142, translated in Heller 1981) Elements such as the snake and the fig tree placed in proximity to the female Sphinx link women and temptation; similarly, a bit later in the century, the "New Woman," the freshly independent woman anathema to conservative French society, was often represented as Medusa, with snakes in her hair.
Moreau excelled in images of manslaughter and encounters involving women and beasts, of which the story of Oedipus and the Sphinx is a prime example. He followed his success with Oedipus and the Sphinx by exhibiting Jason (fig. 3) the next year, in which Medea’s hand on Jason’s shoulder and her grasp on the magic potion that led to his slaying of the dragon at their feet both convey her power over the hero. The Sphinx atop the column next to them reinforces Medea’s role in the death of the dragon. That same year, Moreau also produced Orpheus, in which the finding of the protagonist’s head by a young girl reminds viewers of Orpheus’s gruesome dismemberment by maenads, wild female followers of the god Dionysus (fig. 4). These paintings have been related to anxieties about the changing social position of women that only increased in France by the mid-1870s, when Moreau depicted the biblical femme fatale Salomé (see, for example, fig. 5), who demanded and received the head of Saint John the Baptist in exchange for her seductive dancing (Heller 1981; Mathews 1999); other Academic painters, such as Henri Regnault, also embraced this subject (see, for example, The Met, 16.95). Moreau’s depictions of the mythological themes of the Sphinx, Medea, and Orpheus inspired many Symbolist artists who followed him, like Fernand Khnopff, to undertake their own versions of the subjects.
Moreau’s interest in mythology as a powerful means of conveying ideas through symbols and emblem-laden figures has been discussed extensively by Lacambre (1999), Cooke (2003), Allan (2008), and Larson (2015). Larson argued that the present painting "functions as allegory, with Oedipus, representing the soul of man, treading over the corpses of the material world, all the while resisting the temptations of its seductive side, represented by the female Sphinx. According to this interpretation, Moreau’s figures correspond to specific ideas." Larson noted that this interpretation was steeped in a theory of correspondences between material objects and spiritual ideas that was common in the later nineteenth century. Lacambre also contended that the encounter between Oedipus and the Sphinx encapsulated the opposing forces of good and evil, man and woman, and spiritual and material. Similarly, Allan discussed Moreau’s "emblematizing the equation Matter=Woman=Evil" in the Sphinx (a role that the femme fatale would inhabit soon in Symbolist art), pointed out that several period critics harped on the Sphinx’s "sexually predatory" nature, and termed Moreau’s reading of the myth "misogynistic."
Still other interpretations of the picture have included psychological readings. Paladilhe (1971), in a Freudian reading of Oedipus and the Sphinx, notes that Moreau’s father died just a few months before he began the painting, and argues that the artist projected onto the theme his unconscious desire to exorcise the castrating influence of his mother. It has also been suggested that this work symbolizes Moreau's struggle in choosing the life of an artist and giving up sensual gratification, and, similarly, that it presents an allegory of the artist ‘s own spiritual refusal of material temptations in his pursuit of idealism (Kaplan 1974; Allan 2008).
Studies for the Painting: Moreau made over thirty preparatory sketches for the painting over a two year period. In 1862, he began with studies of stuffed animals and birds in the Muséum d’histoire naturelle (Lacambre 1999). That same year, he received a student card to work in the galleries of anatomy, zoology, botany, geology, and minerology in the same museum, and an artist’s card to work in the Louvre. There, he studied works from antiquity that heavily influenced his archaizing style. In addition to working at the Louvre, he gained knowledge of antique precedents from books in the private library he shared with his father (Helma-Tisserent 1981 and Moret 2000).
Among the many studies for the picture reproduced in Kaplan 1974 are: a pencil study of ca. 1860 for Oedipus sketched into Moreau’s copy of Giovanni De Cavallerii’s Antiquarium Statuarum Urbis Romae (Rome, 1594) (no. 30); a watercolor of Oedipus and the Sphinx of ca. 1860 (no. 31); a first idea for the two figures together in pencil, pen, and ink, of 1861 (no. 29); an undated study for Oedipus, in pencil (no. 32); and an undated study for the Sphinx's wing, in pencil (no. 33), that reveals the artist’s close zoological study. An early sketch in the Musée national Gustave Moreau (fig. 6) shows the artist working out the poses of the Sphinx and Oedipus, whose hipshot stance would soon become more exaggerated. Close studies of the heads of both figures (figs. 7, 8) demonstrate the artist beginning to consider the texture of their hair. Moreau annotated a black chalk study for Oedipus’s body, telling himself to make the figure taller and his thighs longer ("plus haut/ cuisses plus longues") to reach ideal proportions (fig. 9); on the same sheet is what appears to be an image very close to that of the final Oedipus, but with short hair and a beard, squared for transfer to the canvas. In the squared drawing, the artist was directly quoting an antique source for the male figure. An undated pencil study (fig. 10) gives an overall presentation of the composition highly similar to The Met’s picture, but shows that the artist first placed the Sphinx’s chalice atop an ornate column with Ionian capitals to the left of the main figures, before switching it to the right side and changing the appearance of the column as well as the urn. (For other studies, see Lacambre 1999, nos. 28-4–5, 28-7–9, 28-10–12, 28-15–18.)
Source: Jane R. Becker 2016
Open Access
As part of the Met's Open Access policy, you can freely copy, modify and distribute this image, even for commercial purposes.