Sappho in Lefkada by Gustave Moreau Postcard

Sappho in Lefkada by Gustave Moreau is an intricate watercolor portraying the famous ancient Greek poet playing her lyre atop a cliffside before her legendary suicide at the Cape of Lefkada in the Ionian Sea. Amid the detailed, melancholy landscape Sappho’s robes glow warmly in rich, jewel-like colour. Gustave Moreau exhibited with great success in the late 19th century French Salon, and later became a professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris. His noteworthy students included the Modernist Fauve painters Henri Matisse, Albert Marquet, and Georges Rouault. Moreau’s work has much in common with classical 19th century French painters such as Ingres and Delacroix, but he is usually considered part of the French Symbolist movement for his literary, archaic classical style and religious and mythological subject matter.