Title: Figure devant un arbre
Artist: Odilon Redon (French, 1840-1916)
Medium: pastel et fusain on paper
Dimensions: 52.8 x 37.8 cm
Description
Odilon Redon’s work is permeated by the dual poles of fin-de-siècle Symbolism: suffering and hope. From childhood, the artist from Bordeaux was marked by a distinct melancholy. The solitude of his early years and the absence of his mother, Marie-Odile Guérin, fostered a lasting fascination with the Renaissance Mater dolorosa. This fascination is acutely present in the pastel La Souffrance (Suffering). Here, a woman with eyes wide with pain has her face ‘closed’ or ‘framed’ by a veil that falls like a shroud; her clasped hands recall the classic posture of the Holy Women attending Christ’s crucifixion. The golden background and the yellow-green luminous halo suggest a Christian dimension. According to his biographer Alec Wildenstein, the model is the same as for Tête de femme voilée.
The artist’s duality is also embodied in these two pastels. If La Souffrance evokes the memory of an absent mother, Figure devant un arbre was executed during the happier period alongside his wife, Camille Falte. From the 1870s, Redon developed an idealised, youthful beauty, revisited here. In the 1890s, as success arrived, he gradually moved beyond his ‘Noirs’, using pastel to explore new chromatic harmonies, finding greater serenity and warmth. The model’s face in profile draws again from the Italian Renaissance and the Pre-Raphaelites, sharing their sensitivity to literary and religious subjects. Embracing the vertical line of the tree, the figure suggests a contemporary Eve or a Gauguin-esque Tahitian. Draped in a blanket and a headdress perhaps resembling a helmet, she exudes a melancholic yet infinitely seductive charm, comparable to the ‘flower maidens’ from Wagner’s Parsifal, whom Redon often depicted in the 1890s. Her pensive eyes, slender neck, and weary pout bear a striking resemblance to a lithograph of the Valkyrie Brünnhilde he created for La Revue wagnérienne in 1886.
These pastels originate from the Domecy family collection. Baron Robert de Denesvre de Domecy was a close friend and key patron of the artist.
Image Download
Image Dimensions: 2297 x 3200 pixels
Image Size: 3.28 MB
Image Format: JPG
Print Resolution: 300 dpi
Download Format: ZIP Archive
License: Public Domain, Free for Commercial Use
