Saint George and the Dragon

Saint George and the Dragon is an oil on canvas by Gustave Moreau, completed in 1889 and dated 1889–90 by its owner, the National Gallery, London (NG6436); it measures about 141 × 95 cm.

The Marseilles shipowner and collector Louis Mante, who already owned Moreau's Salome Dancing before Herod, commissioned the picture in 1889 and paid 9,000 francs for it, according to the Italian Wikipedia in December 1890. Moreau had in fact begun it much earlier: the canvas appears on a plan of his studio probably drawn up around 1870, and X-rays show that its first design was close to a watercolour of about 1869, now in a private collection in Stuttgart. Five preparatory drawings are in the Musée Gustave Moreau in Paris.

The composition looks back to Raphael's small Saint George in the Louvre, the source of the white horse and the helmeted, armoured saint with his cloak flying behind him. Moreau also drew on Carpaccio's murals in the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni in Venice, which he copied in 1857, and the National Gallery notes the influence of Carlo Crivelli's ornate late Gothic style, Byzantine icons and Indian and Persian miniatures. Saint George is a slender, long-haired youth rather than a mature warrior, and with his gold halo and flat, outlined design he recalls an icon. The princess prays on a rock high above in a patterned cloak like an eastern carpet, and the castle behind her has a domed tower borrowed from the Romanesque church of Notre-Dame-la-Grande in Poitiers. The gallery reads the saint as a figure of spiritual purity who, in slaying the dragon, may also be overcoming crude animal appetites; Marcel Proust remarked that he seems to endure his own valour calmly.

After Mante the painting passed through private collections, and the National Gallery bought it from Arthur Tooth and Sons in 1976. Oil paintings by Moreau are comparatively rare, since much of his output was in watercolour.