Title: La barque aux deux femmes blanches
Artist: Odilon Redon (French, 1840-1916)
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 33 x 41.6 cm
Description
Beautiful ships, gently borne by the eternal wave, rest in a friendly harbor. Their long masts and fine rigging pierce the misty sky; the breath of air and the rhythm of the waves cradle the spirit like a gentle harmony.—Odilon Redon
This work depicts two women clad in white aboard a sailboat moving into the distance within a dreamlike setting, beneath a radiant, rainbow-hued sky. Redon’s vessels are not at the mercy of Romanticism’s turbulent seas; they float almost motionless on the water, their sails slack. The surroundings evoke an all-encompassing ideality through metaphor and poetry.
La barque aux deux femmes blanches is an iconic seascape by Redon. The figures seem rapt in pensive silence, immersed in the glow of inward vision, carried toward distant, unknowable realms on spectral currents of dream. After embracing color around 1893, the nightmarish quality that characterized his earlier graphic work yielded to a more beatific revelation of the world. Through vibrant tints, he conjured a brilliant, otherworldly fluorescence, capturing the fleeting essence of dreams.
The contemplative depth in Redon’s work stems from an exploration of the mystical dimension in human aspiration—an assertion of idealism. He navigated the anti-naturalist milieu that fostered Symbolism, drawing from the Catholic Revival, Eastern thought (particularly the life of the Buddha), and esoteric movements like Theosophy. Throughout his career, Redon remained an intensely inner-directed artist, placing the demands of art above all. As Maurice Denis noted in 1912, “He is at the origin of all aesthetic innovations… His lesson is his inability to paint anything that does not represent a state of the soul.” Later, the Surrealists hailed him as a forerunner. Henri Matisse admired “the purity and ardor of his palette.” Even Marcel Duchamp acknowledged his debt: “If I were to say what my own point of departure has been, I should say it was the art of Odilon Redon.”
Image Download
Image Dimensions: 3200 x 2486 pixels
Image Size: 743 KB
Image Format: JPG
Print Resolution: 300 dpi
Download Format: ZIP Archive
License: Public Domain, Free for Commercial Use
