Modern Age
Odilon Redon (1840–1916)
French Symbolism painter.
Odilon Redon was the most inward of the French Symbolists, a painter who spent decades in black before opening into color. Born in Bordeaux in 1840 and raised in part at the isolated estate of Peyrelebade, he trained briefly in Paris, failed to settle in the academic atelier, and through the 1870s and 1880s produced the charcoal 'noirs' — floating eyes, hybrid creatures, and dream heads — that made his name among writers.
Around 1890 he turned toward pastel, oil, and a visionary color: Buddhas in flowers, Apollos in their chariots, and the late Cyclops peering over a landscape of impossible greens. He wrote in the journal later published as 'À soi-même' that he placed the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible. The 1994 Art Institute of Chicago exhibition 'Prince of Dreams,' organized by Douglas W. Druick, remains the modern synthesis of the noirs and the color period.
Redon died in Paris in 1916. His dream flora and one-eyed giants offered the next century a Symbolist alternative to Impressionist daylight.
The words the record keeps using: visionary, inward, dreamlike, luminous, unsettling, metaphysical.
At a glance
- Lived 1840–1916
- Origin French
- Worked in Paris
- Era Modern Age
- Movements Symbolism
- Mediums Oil on panel, Oil on canvas, Pastel
- Techniques Oil glazing, Chiaroscuro
Works in the archive
- The Buddha, 1904 (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Google Art Project))
A seated Buddha is enclosed in a shower of gold and blossom, the figure half-dissolved into the field of color. Redon's late sacred pictures treat Buddhist stillness as a vision of light rather than as ethnographic… - The Chariot of Apollo, 1907 (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)
Apollo's horses climb a gold and clouded sky, the chariot more a burst of light than a vehicle. Redon painted the subject several times in his last decade; the Fitzwilliam panel is a compact oil-on-panel version of the… - The Cyclops, 1914 (Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo)
A one-eyed giant rises over a hillside, gazing toward a sleeping nymph in a landscape of unnatural greens and golds. One of Redon's late mythic oils, it treats Polyphemus not as a brute of the Odyssey but as a lonely,…
What was said
In the journal later published as À soi-même, Redon wrote that he placed the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible — submitting dream images to a craftsman's control rather than copying daylight.
Druick's Prince of Dreams catalogue treats the noirs and the late color pictures as one career: black as a full visionary material, then gold and flower color as the same inward image released into hue.
The turn to pastel and oil around 1890 did not abandon the dream method: Buddhas, chariots, and the Cyclops keep the noir's isolated visionary figure, now held in blooming rather than smoked atmosphere.
What would Odilon make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Odilon Redon", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Odilon · Keep a life moment the way Odilon would · Pictures made after Odilon