 I believe neither in what I touch nor what I see. I only believe in what I do not see and solely in what I feel. Gustav Morro. We're very, very excited at Woodstone to be the first venue of an exhibition which displays to the public for the first time since 1906 some of the most extraordinary works of art by Gustav Morro. We've got all 35 surviving works from this incredible series of originally 64 watercolours that illustrate the fables of Jean de Lafontaine which were a collection of fables from many, many sources gathered together in the 17th century. The fables of Lafontaine are one of the great classics of French literature and everybody in France knows them and they're still a very important part of what children learn at school. So they were written as much for adults as they were for children. They have these wonderful, pithy morals. They reveal some very dark truths about power and money and greed and desire and very importantly talking animals. It was one of the great innovations. I sing those heroes, Esop's progeny, whose tales fictitious though they be contain much truth. Herein, endowed with speech, even the fish will all my creatures teach with human voice. For animals I choose to profit lessons that we all might use. Jean de Lafontaine. They're certainly not as well known in Britain as they are in France though I think visitors to this exhibition will recognise certainly quite a lot of the stories. I think one of the most familiar is probably the fox and the grapes which is where we get our phrase sour grapes. It's a very short, very simple story about a fox who tries to reach some luscious ripe grapes, can't reach it so he says sour grapes, he says they're green. One of the things about book illustration is that any artist who illustrates a canonical text like Lafontaine's fables is always working within a lineage of other illustrators. So perhaps the most famous illustrator of the fables is Udri whose illustrations after whose designs we have in the collection here. They became also very popular in the 19th century. Udri was working in the 18th century. So I think it's important to remember when looking at Moreau they strike us with their novelty, with their innovation with what he brings new to the way the stories are told but when the first audiences looked at them they would also have been intensely aware of where he draws upon earlier models and where he diverges from them when he brings something very opposite. Gustave Moreau is one of the most brilliant and influential artists of 19th century France. One of the things I find fascinating about him is how difficult he is to categorise in a period that's full of so many isms. He was a great admirer of Ang for example but can't really be said to be neoclassical. You'll see particularly in these watercolours such a love of kind of emotionally charged colour. It's a lot of Orientalism. There's clearly a great influence of du Lacroix but he's not a romantic. He thought Impressionism was banal and certainly didn't see himself as a realist. The ism with which he's come to be associated though he wouldn't have called himself a symbolist is symbolism. He is a mystic locked up in the centre of Paris in a cell to which not even noise of contemporary life can penetrate though it beats furiously at the gates of the cloister. Wrapped in ecstasy he sees entrancing visions glitter before his eyes the sanguinary apotheosis of other ages. The commission for the fables came from Anthony Roux who was a rich collector from Marseille. He commissioned the fables in 1879 and his first idea was to have a series of fables illustrations made by quite a large group of the leading artists in Paris at that time and he had an exhibition in 1881 which was well received but all the critics said that what really really stood out in this large group show of the first subjects of the fables was Morro. After that exhibition Roux decided that the rest of the series was to be completed by Morro alone. There are lots and lots of letters that are still preserved in the Moussé Gustave Morro in Paris through which you can chart the whole commission and it's clear that Roux had very strong opinions himself about what he wanted. For example, Roux arranged for a taxidermist to send a whole load of frogs some live, some stuffed to Morro and there's letters that explain what he needs to feed them how long he can expect to keep them alive when he should release them, that kind of thing. So there's a lot of back and forth you get a wonderful sense through the letters of the excitement of waiting for these watercolours and then unpacking the batches there's a particularly good letter where he says that he wasted feverish with anticipation and that was before the batch that included the mouse transformed into a girl he's feverish with excitement at what it will be like and full of admiration when it comes. Morro was making these watercolours at the height of a great revival in watercolour as a medium in France in the 19th century Watercolour had been very much discovered earlier in the century particularly by Jericho and Doulakois who were really excited by British watercolour artists the works of Turner and Bonnington in particular. Some of the fables like the shepherds in the sea for example they do remind me very much of the work of Turner those sort of outdoor sky filled, light filled compositions but elsewhere they're quite different they're very very finished, highly worked you get a sense of the range of how he uses this medium in the most extraordinary work in the whole series I think which is the head and tail of the snake in which you can make out figures on rocks there's heads of drowning people floating there's minute little creatures, flying creatures like devils or maybe some lost souls climbing up inside the cave but the overall impression of the thing is of watercolour at its broadest it's all about colour, it's not about lines I think a lot of visitors will really enjoy finding influences and artistic quotations in these works so there's Renaissance, there's French 18th century, French 19th century there's Dutch 17th century still lives quoted and very recognisable in some of the works but Morro picks and chooses what he wants he selects quite incongruously sometimes from this wealth of European, Asian, modern, ancient cultures brings them all together and transforms them he was very daunted by suddenly having to get to grips with real animals animals that he wasn't particularly familiar with and very difficult to draw he spends a lot of time in the Jardin de Plante, the main zoo in Paris other artists, actually Udri, had also done when it was the Royal Menagerie the drawings of animals are extraordinary because he gets so fascinated by how they look, how they move how they eat, how they relate to each other there are wonderful details of claws, of teeth, of ears he becomes utterly fascinated, captivated by these animals and he's really diligent there he doesn't just draw the animals in their cages he also goes and looks at the gallery of comparative anatomy so there are some marvellous drawings of elephant skeletons for example he makes sure that he positions himself in relation to the skeleton exactly in the same position as he wants to draw the elephant itself in the finished watercolours there's a great array, a great variety of ways of seeing animals so sometimes he kind of keeps the naturalism of the observational drawings that he's made in the zoo and at other times he chooses these rather stylised, quite sort of mannerist ways of seeing animals and one of the most extraordinary examples of that is perhaps the dolphin and the monkey where he puts two different ways of seeing animals together the monkey itself is almost shockingly real this sort of screaming, vocalising monkey this is not a playful 18th century monkey it's a real post-Darwinian, terrifying talking monkey on the top of a dolphin who I always feel could have come out of Fontainebleau like an enamel or a stucco carving and certainly something associated with heraldic emblems rather than a real dolphin after Anthony Rue died his collection was sold off at auction but the auction catalogue explains that the crowning glory of his collection was Morrow's fables and that he didn't want this ever to be broken up so it explains that the fables have been bought by a lover of art before the rest of the collection goes to auction and that lover of art was Miriam Alexandrine de Rothschild who was a member of the French Rothschild family she was the daughter of Baron Edmond de Rothschild and Edmond de Rothschild himself was a great admirer of Morrow he said he was the greatest French artist of modern times he owned among others David's Dancing Before the Ark which is a very beautiful watercolor still in a Rothschild private collection which is on display alongside the fables at Wadstone during the run of this exhibition in many ways Miriam Alexandrine shows continuity with her father's tastes for example in her love of illustrated books and in her reverence for Morrow in other ways she is clearly a really innovative interesting collector in her own right she's very unusual among the Rothschilds for example in her interest in the most avant-garde of modern art for example Gauguin, Van Gogh, Cezanne the last time the fables watercolors were seen in public was in an exhibition in Paris in 1906 and then they disappeared from view I can't tell you how exciting it was to see them for the first time knowing that they hadn't been on public display for over a hundred years I only knew them as rather dingy black and white photographs and I was very worried for all their fame and mystique and the charisma that has accumulated around them that they may not live up to their expectation but it was quite extraordinary seeing them taken out of their boxes these fiery colours and fragile surfaces the textures even through the glass when I first saw them they shone out I hope that after this terrible year and lockdowns that coming to this exhibition and seeing of these works of art in person it's a very small, intense, immersive exhibition just one room with these 35 watercolours glowing around you on the walls and I hope that visitors to the exhibition will get something of the excitement that I had when I first saw these extraordinary works unpacked from their boxes everything was fable once everything is fable still beneath the paintbrush of Monsieur Gustave Morot Harry Renaud