Gustave Moreau was a 19th-century symbolist painter in France. The symbolists believed that the art of the 18th century was too scientific and had discarded spirituality from its subject matter and execution.
Artists also found themselves competing with the newly invented camera. Instead of only reproducing reality like a camera would or ignoring the spiritual as earlier artists had, the symbolists set out to create suprasensible imagery by attempting to synthesize the content of their souls with representations of the natural world.
