King David

Authors Oscar Wilde and Marcel Proust loved Gustave Moreau's strange, mystical paintings. His 7-foot-high King David, unveiled at the 1878 Paris World's Fair, reflected Moreau's concerns about rising secularity after the Paris uprisings of 1871. In this velvety etching, the weary king ponders his fallibility and what Moreau called the emptiness of life. Broken flowers all around, an angel takes up David's lyre in a sign of hope. This rare impression on vellum is the print Félix Bracquemond inscribed to Moreau.