Odilon Redon - part 12

Odilon Redon (1840 Bordeaux - 1916 Paris) was a French Symbolist painter, lithographer, and etcher of considerable poetic sensitivity and imagination, whose work developed along two divergent lines. His prints explore haunted, fantastic, often macabre themes and foreshadowed the Surrealist and Dadaist movements. His oils and pastels, chiefly still lifes with flowers, won him the admiration of Henri Matisse and other painters as an important colourist.

Redon studied under Jean-Léon Gérôme; and mastered engraving from Rodolphe Vresdin, who exerted an important influence; and learned lithography under Henri Fantin-Latour. His aesthetic was one of imagination rather than visual perception. His imagination found an intellectual catalyst in his close friend, the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé. Redon was also associated with the group of Symbolist painters.

Redon produced nearly 200 prints, beginning in 1879 with the lithographs collectively titled In the Dream. He completed another series (1882) dedicated to Edgar Allan Poe, whose poems had been translated into French with great success by Mallarmé and Charles Baudelaire. Rather than illustrating Poe, Redon’s lithographs are poems in visual terms, themselves evoking the poet’s world of private torment. There is an evident link to Goya in Redon’s imagery of winged demons and menacing shapes, and one of his series was the Homage to Goya (1885).

About the time of the print series The Apocalypse of St. John (1889), Redon began devoting himself to painting and colour drawing—sensitive floral studies, and heads that appear to be dreaming or lost in reverie. He developed a unique palette of powdery and pungent hues. Though there is a relationship between his work and that of the Impressionist painters, he opposed both Impressionism and Realism as wholly perceptual.

This is part 12 of 13 on the works of Odilon Redon:

n.d. Green plant in an urn
oil on canvas 85 x 60 cm
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
© RMN-Grand Palais (Orsay Museum)

n.d. Hallucinations
charcoal on tan paper 29.5 x 23.7 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

n.d. Haystacks covered with tarps near a tree
oil on paper mounted on cardboard 18.7 x 25 cm
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
© RMN-Grand Palais (Orsay Museum)

n.d. Hazy sun on a moor
oil on paper mounted on cardboard 23.8 x 32.5 cm
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
© RMN-Grand Palais (Orsay Museum)

n.d. Head in a Sphere
lead pencil 20.6 x 13 cm
Louvre, Paris © NMR

n.d. Head of a bearded man
charcoal and stumping on grey paper 30.7 x 29.3 cm
RMN-Grand Palais 

n.d. Head of a female
brush, ink and wash on paper 12.1 x 18.1 cm

n.d. Head of a woman in profile
charcoal on buff paper 52.2 x 36.4 cm
The British Museum, London

n.d. Head of a Woman
pastel on brown paper 59.6 x 72.3 cm
Dallas Museum of Art, Texas

n.d. Head of a woman
watercolour on paper 17.4 x 15.7 cm

n.d. Head of a young woman
graphite on brown paper 36.1 x 25.6 cm
Louvre, Paris © NMR

n.d. Head of a young woman
graphite, black pencil and stumping on pink paper
 25.6 x 25.6 cm
Louvre, Paris © NMR

n.d. Head of a young woman
pastel on grey-prepared paper 52.6 x 37.7 cm
Harvard Art Museums-Fogg Museum
Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College

n.d. Head of Orpheus
oil on canvas 32.2 x 40.2 cm
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
© RMN-Grand Palais (Orsay Museum)

n.d. Head of the Virgin
pencil on blue paper 28.2 x 19.7 cm
Louvre, Paris © NMR

n.d. Hill, near Royan
oil on canvas 24 x 31.9 cm
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
© RMN-Grand Palais (Orsay Museum)

n.d. Horse: with a Dragon
graphite  11.5 x 11.3 cm
The British Museum, London

n.d. House with two trees
oil on paper mounted on canvas 24.8 x 17.7 cm
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
© RMN-Grand Palais (Orsay Museum)

n.d. Jewish wedding in Morocco (copy after Delacroix)
oil on canvas 40 x 32.5 cm
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
© RMN-Grand Palais (Orsay Museum)

n.d. Joan of Arc
pastel 52 x 36 cm
© RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d'Orsay)

n.d. Landscape at sunset
watercolour and varnish 20.3 x 14.8 cm
RMN-Grand Palais (Orsay Museum) 

n.d. Madame Redon
reading graphite on blue paper 17.5 x 15.6 cm
Louvre, Paris

n.d. Man in a large black hat, dressed in a doublet
graphite  on brown paper 12 x 12.5 cm
RMN-Grand Palais (Orsay Museum)

n.d. Mephisto
charcoal with touches of black chalk, stumping, scraping and erasing, on yellowish-tan wove paper 37.8 x 35.6 cm

n.d. Médoc, the clump of trees
oil on paper mounted on cardboard 22 x 27 cm
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
© RMN-Grand Palais (Orsay Museum)

n.d. Médoc, the moor
oil on paper laid down on cardboard 33.5 x 41 cm
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
© RMN-Grand Palais (Orsay Museum)

n.d. Médoc, the tree 

oil on canvas mounted on cardboard 33 x 41 cm 

Musée d'Orsay, Paris 

© RMN-Grand Palais (Orsay Museum)

n.d. Path near the sea
oil on paper mounted on cardboard 19.5 x 26.3 cm
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
© RMN-Grand Palais (Orsay Museum)

n.d. Path near the sea
oil on cardboard 24.5 x 32 cm
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
© RMN-Grand Palais (Orsay Museum)

n.d. Parsifal
pastel 66 x 52 cm
RMN-Grand Palais (Orsay Museum)

n.d. Old tree in a meadow
oil on paper mounted on cardboard 18.2 x 25.7 cm
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
© RMN-Grand Palais (Orsay Museum)

n.d. Night
oil  on paper mounted on cardboard 18 x 23.4 cm
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
© RMN-Grand Palais (Orsay Museum)

n.d. Morgat seen from the dunes of La Palue
oil on paper mounted on cardboard 26.5 x 40 cm
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
© RMN-Grand Palais (Orsay Museum)

n.d. Moor with a pond
oil on paper mounted on cardboard 182 x 285 cm
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
© RMN-Grand Palais (Orsay Museum)

n.d. Mill in Brittany
oil on paper mounted on cardboard 34.7 x 26.6 cm
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
© RMN-Grand Palais (Orsay Museum)

n.d. Mill in Brittany
oil on paper mounted on cardboard 26 x 34.8 cm
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
© RMN-Grand Palais (Orsay Museum)

n.d. Pear Blossoms
pastel on paper 94.6 x 76.8 cm
Dallas Museum of Art, Texas

n.d. Peyrelebade
oil on canvas 36.7 x 45 cm
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
© RMN-Grand Palais (Orsay Museum)

n.d. Poppies and sweet carnations in a vase
oil on canvas 60.2 x 73.2 cm

n.d. Poppy Eye
charcoal on buff paper 48.5 x 33 cm
© Louvre Museum, dist. RMN-Grand Palais

n.d. Portrait of a young woman in a blue cap
pastel 53 x 39.5 cm
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
© RMN-Grand Palais (Orsay Museum)

n.d. Portrait of Madame Odilon Redon
pastel and sanguine 55 x 44.5 cm
 Louvre, Paris

n.d. Prancing horse on a treetop
oil on paper 47 x 49 cm
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
© RMN-Grand Palais (Orsay Museum)

n.d. Precarious Glow
lithograph 27.3 x 20.6 cm
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

n.d. Profile head and other sketches
black crayon on buff wove paper 31.1 x 20 cm

n.d. Pyrenees Mountain
oil on paper mounted on cardboard 24 x 33 cm
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
© RMN-Grand Palais (Orsay Museum)

n.d. Redon's Studio
graphite, pen, brown ink on cream paper 17.8 x 24.4 cm
Louvre, Paris

n.d. Redon's Studio
graphite, pencil, pen, and India ink 17.8 x 23.8 cm
Louvre, Paris