The Young Man And Death 1856 - 1865

Gustave Moreau’s painting The Young Man and Death is rendered in oil paint on canvas, a technique which, by the late nineteenth century, had become the default for academically trained artists. But look closely, and you can see that Moreau has layered his pigments in a way that recalls earlier techniques like fresco or tempera. Instead of building up rich, glossy surfaces, he's aimed for a chalky, matte effect. This gives the painting a feeling of having been created by accumulation, almost geological in its slow accretion. The subject matter, a nude youth with a personification of death, speaks to the grand historical themes that were then considered the very stuff of ‘high art’. Yet Moreau has rendered it all with a distinctive kind of flatness, a deliberate denial of illusionism. In doing so, he challenges the viewer to consider the painting not just as a window onto another world, but as an accumulation of material worked by hand. It’s a process of making as much as it is a feat of representation.