Title: La Souffrance
Artist: Odilon Redon (French, 1840-1916)
Medium: pastel on paper
Dimensions: 52.5 x 37.8 cm
Description
“Pastel sustains me… materially and mentally, it rejuvenates me.” So wrote Odilon Redon in 1897. The work of this iconic Symbolist master is perpetually woven from two fundamental forces: suffering and hope.
Redon’s early years were steeped in solitude and a distinct melancholy, shaped by his upbringing at the family manor in Peyrelebade and the absence of his mother, Marie-Odile Guérin. This absence perhaps explains his enduring fascination with the Renaissance theme of the Mater Dolorosa. In the pastel La Souffrance (Suffering), this fascination takes form. A woman, her eyes wide with pain, has her face ‘closed’ or ‘framed’ by a veil that falls like a shroud. Her clasped hands recall the Holy Women attending Christ’s crucifixion. A golden background and a 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.
Youthful adversity continued in Paris, where he felt misunderstood in the academic studio of Gérôme. It was not until his 1880 marriage to Camille Falte that happiness and success began to dawn. The artist’s duality is juxtaposed in this pair of pastels: La Souffrance appears as a memory of the absent mother, while Figure devant un arbre was executed during his happier years with his wife. By the 1890s, Redon moved away from his early ‘Noirs’, exploring colour through pastel to find greater serenity and warmth. Here, a female figure stands in profile, her form aligning with the vertical tree, evoking a contemporary Eve or a Gauguin-esque Tahitian. Draped in a blanket-like garment and a headdress resembling a helmet, her pensive face, slender neck, and lingering melancholy carry an infinite seduction, recalling the ‘flower maidens’ from Wagner’s Parsifal that Redon favoured in the 1890s. Her features bear a striking resemblance to his 1886 lithograph of the Valkyrie Brünnhilde for La Revue wagnérienne.
These two pastels originate from the collection of the Domecy family. Baron Robert de Denesvre de Domecy was a close friend and key patron of the artist.
Image Download
Image Dimensions: 2280 x 3200 pixels
Image Size: 2.98 MB
Image Format: JPG
Print Resolution: 300 dpi
Download Format: ZIP Archive
License: Public Domain, Free for Commercial Use
