Title: Fleurs dans une cruche bleue
Artist: Odilon Redon (French, 1840-1916)
Medium: pastel on buff paper
Dimensions: 62.7 x 51.7 cm
Description
After 1895, Redon turned to pastel with growing assurance, confident that his devoted collectors of noir drawings would embrace this new chromatic phase. In a March 1899 group exhibition at Galerie Durand-Ruel, he presented seven pastels alongside Nabi and Post-Impressionist works. All were sold, encouraging his further experimentation with the medium.
This exploration of color coincided with a flourishing of floral imagery. Redon called flowers “admirable prodigies of light,” their pure and varied hues providing an ideal foundation for his studies in pastel and oil. While his compositions appear lush and nearly tropical, his subjects were ordinary garden and field blossoms, often gathered by his own hand from the garden at Bièvres. Unlike Monet’s plein air practice, Redon preferred to stage his flowers indoors, arranging them in vases on tables or mantles.
In many floral pastels, he used the paper’s tone as a ground, setting delicate strokes of pastel against a flat, neutral space. The airy, ephemeral quality of the medium echoes East Asian traditions of stylized nature within a decorative frame. A defining feature of these works is the balance between vision and naturalism, the ambiguity between dream and reality. This piece encapsulates Redon’s vibrant use of color through masterful pastel technique—rendering form with lightness and luminosity, transforming nature into poetry.
Image Download
Image Dimensions: 2696 x 3200 pixels
Image Size: 712 KB
Image Format: JPG
Print Resolution: 300 dpi
Download Format: ZIP Archive
License: Public Domain, Free for Commercial Use
