Title: Fleurs dans une coupe bleue
Artist: Odilon Redon (French, 1840-1916)
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 38 x 46 cm
Date Created: 1900
Description
Odilon Redon’s flowers bloom at the confluence of reality and dream. “Flowers, lying at the confluence of two streams, that of representation and that of memory,” he noted in his diary. His early friendship with botanist Armand Clavaud initiated him into science, literature, and Eastern thought, profoundly shaping his artistic vision.
In Fleurs dans une coupe bleue, blossoms merge into an incandescence of variegated color. The composition is both dense and light, balanced by a subtle harmony of hues. The blue light reflected by the vase resonates more intensely within the bouquet itself. Redon plays with effects of matter and form, believing art’s essence was “to always remain equivocal, with double, or triple aspects, hints of aspect, forms yet to be, according to the spectator’s frame of mind.”
His magic lies in suggestion rather than statement—implying, as his friend Stéphane Mallarmé put it, “what is absent from any bunch of flowers.” The vase is placed in an indefinable space, severed from reality, yet butterflies intrude like an incursion of nature into the still life. A critic observed that Redon paints flowers as seen in dreams: they do not flourish under the sun; their noon is moonlight, emerging from our reveries and Oriental legends.
Image Download
Image Dimensions: 3200 x 2609 pixels
Image Size: 685 KB
Image Format: JPG
Print Resolution: 300 dpi
Download Format: ZIP Archive
License: Public Domain, Free for Commercial Use
