1867 Self-Portrait oil on wood 41.7 x 32 cm Musée d'Orsay, Paris © RMN-Grand Palais (Orsay Museum) |
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 1 of 13 on the works of Odilon Redon:
1851 Peasant Woman from the Basque Country black pencil with white chalk on buff paper 37.7 x 294 cm Louvre, Paris © NMR |
1857 Landes Landscape lead pencil 13 x 18.5 cm RMN-Grand Palais |
1859 The Moor at Lormoriti black pencil on beige paper 15 x 22 cm RMN (Musée d'Orsay) |
1860-70 Lion hunting (after Delacroix) oil on canvas 46 x 55 cm Musée d'Orsay, Paris © RMN-Grand Palais (Orsay Museum) |
1860-80 Study of Man between Trees graphite 24.8 x 19.1 cm Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
1860s Horse and Rider with Lance graphite on wove paper 17.1 x 21 cm (sheet) Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA |
1861 The Bridge watercolour and varnish on blue paper 16.3 x 26 cm Louvre, Paris, © NMR |
1862 Boat moored at the edge of a Pond black pencil on beige paper 24.6 x 35.2 cm Louvre, Paris © NMR |
1865 Battle etching and drypoint 7.4 x 14.7 cm (plate) |
1865 Fear etching on cream laid paper 11 x 20 cm (image) |
1865 Horsemen in Combat etching and drypoint on ivory laid paper 10.2 x 13.9 cm (plate) |
1865 In Spain etching on off-white wove paper 20 x 11 cm (plate) |
1865 Meditation etching on white wove paper 9.8 x 6.2 cm (plate) |
1865 Old Age charcoal, stumping, erasing, reworking in black pencil and fixative on vellum paper 31 x 24.3 cm RMN-Grand Palais (Orsay Museum) |
1865 The Battle charcoal on coloured paper 63.5 x 113.7 cm MoMA, New York |
1865 The Ford sketch for the etching (in reverse) graphite on cream tracing paper 8.7 x 11.4 cm |
1865 The Ford: Landscape with Horsemen etching on ivory wove paper 24.2 x 16 cm (plate) |
1865 The Two Small Horsemen etching on ivory wove paper 9.9 x 8 cm (image) |
1865 Two Figures in a Landscape graphite on wove paper 22.2 x 22.5 cm National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC |
c1865-70 The Banks of the Seine at Conflans oil on canvas 46.4 x 55.6 cm Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
1865-68 Two Grotesque Figures, after Eugène Delacroix graphite on ivory wove paper 17.5 x 22.3 cm |
c1865 The Flight ink and pencil on paper 30.1 x 47 cm Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands |
1866 Chapel and Pilgrim’s Hospice at Harambeltz (Basses-Pyrenees) etching on cream China paper 6.1 x 13.6 cm (image) |
1866 Fear etching on ivory wove paper 11 x 20 cm (image) |
1866 Galloping Horseman etching National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC |
1866 Horseman in the Mountains etching on paper 8.4 x 11.3 cm (image) |
1866 Horseman under a Stormy Sky etching on white wove paper 5.9 x 13.9 cm (image) |
1866 Horseman Waiting etching on ivory wove paper 10.1 x 7 cm (image) |
1866 Horsemen in Combat etching on ivory wove paper 8.3 x 18.2 cm (image) |
before 1870 Sketches of Leaves and two Heads etching printed in red ink 12.2 x 8.2 cm The British Museum, London |
c1868 Woman Kneeling graphite on cream wove paper 25.5 x 20.5 cm |
c1868 The Head of Saint John the Baptist (after Andrea Solario) pencil and chalk on paper 29.2 x 34 cm MoMA, New York |
1868 Standard-Bearer crossing a Stream etching and drypoint on cream China paper 10.2 x 16.8 cm (image) |
1868 Landscape charcoal, black chalk, conté crayon, wiping, stumping and erasing on cream wove paper 53.6 x 75.5 cm Art Institute of Chicago, IL |
c1867 Poppies and Daisies oil on cardboard 19 x 23.5 cm Art Institute of Chicago, IL |
c1866 Portrait of a Young Man (after Holbein) pencil on coloured paper 23.2 x 18.1 cm MoMA, New York |
c1866 Hermit in Landscape pen and black ink on tan card 12 x 17.2 cm |
c1866-68 Vase of Flowers oil on canvas 28.5 x 19 cm Dumbarton Oaks Museum, Washington, DC |
1866 St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port etching (right half only of the plate after it had been cut) 12.2 x 8.4 cm The British Museum, London |
1866 St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port etching 14 x 22.1 cm (plate) |
1870-75 Anchorite (Fantastic Scene) graphite on cream wove paper, darkened 32 x 24-5 cm Harvard Art Museums-Fogg Museum Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College |
1870-80 Female Head pencil on wove paper 20 x 15.5 cm Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands |
c1870 The Headhunter and his Family graphite 29.5 x 12.9 cm National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC |
1871 The Fallen Angel charcoal on paper 28.6 x 23.6 cm Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands |
c1871 Misery chalk on paper 21.3 x 20.2 cm Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands |
1872 Primitive Man charcoal, black chalk, stumping heightened with touches of white and ochre gouache, on cream wove paper 39.3 x 33.8 cm Art Institute of Chicago, IL |
1873 Descent into Hell charcoal and black chalk, with stumping, erasing and wiping, on rose paper altered to a light golden tone 38.4 x 22.2 cm MoMA, New York |
c1873 The Great Tree charcoal and chalk on paper 52.7 x 37.4 cm Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands |
1875 Head of a Man charcoal and chalk on paper 38.7 x 33.2 cm Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands |
1875-80 The Old Monk charcoal on paper 36.5 x 29.6 cm Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands |
c1875 Apache (Man on Horseback) oil over traces of black chalk on tan card-stock mounted on canvas 25.1 x 32.4 cm MoMA, New York |
c1875 Fishing Boat oil on canvas mounted on canvas 16.8 x 21.9 cm MoMA, New York |
c1875 Head of a Woman charcoal on paper 36.4 x 35.5 cm Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands |
c1875 Head of Perseus oil on canvas 54.7 x 45.7 cm Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands |