The Exposition (1892 Salon) and its aftermath also prompted the only known correspondence between Moreau and Burne-Jones. Moreau, who had been instrumental in awarding Burne-Jones a médaille d’honneur for King Cophetua, apparently asked his patron Charles Ephrussi to put him in contact with Burne-Jones; through the offices of Ephrussi and Burne-Jones’s friend Lady Brook, Burne-Jones sent Moreau a photograph of The Seven Days of Creation [Figure 25]. The sole surviving letter from Moreau to Burne-Jones is an effusive note of thanks, extolling the work’s ‘charming and delicate attention [to detail]’ and acknowledging Burne- Jones as a kindred spirit whose sympathy was ‘one of the rarest and most beautiful recompenses of my long working life’.95 While we unfortunately have no record of Burne-Jones’s letters, Moreau’s affinity with Burne-Jones is attested to not only by this letter, but by the fact that the photograph, the only reproduction of a contemporary work in his personal collection, was still hanging in Moreau’s house when he died six years later.96 Although the existence of this artefact of an interchange between the two artists is occasionally remarked upon without further comment, both Burne-Jones’s choice of a work to send Moreau and the latter’s response to it are worth considering. The Seven Days of Creation shows Burne-Jones at both his most deliberately archaic, with its polyptych format and austere verticality and his most original and (to conservative eyes) unsettling, with its host of melancholic, androgynous angels who appear to exist at an utter remove from reality. Such characteristics were, of course, salient in much of Moreau’s work, and it seems safe to suppose that Burne-Jones deliberately selected as his offering to Moreau the painting he considered to best demonstrate their aesthetic affinities. 95 ‘Quelle attention délicate et charmante!’; ‘d’une sympathie [qui est] . . . pour moi une des plus rares et des plus belles récompenses de ma longue vie de travailleur’: Fondation Custodia, Lugt Collection, Moreau, G.: 9308a, letter to Burne-Jones. 96 This evidence of Moreau’s admiration for Burne-Jones is somewhat complicated by the fact that a disparaging article on the latter, penned by Robert de Montesquiou in 1894 when Burne-Jones’s fortunes in France were on the wane and describing his paintings witheringly as ‘des Christmas-cards géants et sublimes’ was found among Moreau’s belongings at his death: R. de Montesquiou, ‘Burne Jones’, La Revue illustrée 18, no. 212 (1 October 1894), p. 48.