At the gates of Thebes, a monster with a lion's body, eagle's wings and a woman's face stops every traveler and asks a riddle. Those who fail to answer die. Gustave Moreau paints the moment Oedipus faces her. He stands nude on a rocky ledge, leaning on a spear and looking straight at the Sphinx, who rises up the length of his body and clings to his chest. Below them, on the ground, are the remains of her earlier victims.
The painting was shown at the Paris Salon of 1864 and made Moreau's reputation. He was thirty-eight and almost unknown, and the public and critics responded to a mythological picture that felt like a psychological one. The Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that Moreau knew Ingres's version of the subject from 1808, which he had sketched, and that he had studied Mantegna's paintings at the Louvre.
Moreau's Sphinx is not simply a threat. She presses herself close to him, and he does not pull away. It reads as a confrontation and an embrace at once, which is the kind of ambiguity that Symbolist painters would build on for decades. The painting came to the Met in 1920 as a bequest from William H. Herriman.
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