In order to atone for killing his family, the mythical ancient Greek hero Hercules was tasked with completing twelve difficult feats. His second task was to slay the Lernaean Hydra, a water monster with multiple serpentine heads. Gustave Moreau depicted their encounter in this work, exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1876, indulging his taste for the ghoulish. Hercules confronts the Hydra in a swampy landscape, rendered as a primordial ooze of brown paint and strewn with the fragmented and decomposing bodies of previous victims. Calm and youthful, Hercules stands amid the carnage, weapon in hand, ready to sever the Hydra’s seventh, “immortal” head, which he will later bury.

Despite the violent subject, the painting seems eerily still, almost frozen. Reinforcing this mysterious quality is Moreau’s ability to combine suggestive, painterly passages with obsessive detail. His precise draftsmanship and otherworldly palette are the result of his painstaking methods; he executed numerous preliminary studies for every detail in the composition, even sketching live snakes at the Paris zoo.

Moreau might have intended this mythological painting to express contemporary political concerns: he was profoundly aff ected by France’s military defeat at the hands of Prussia in 1870–71. Hercules might literally personify France; the Hydra could represent Prussia. Whether or not this was the artist’s intention, this monumental work portrays a moral battle between the forces of good and evil with intensity and power, combining history, myth, mysticism, and a fascination with the bizarre.