Key points
- A self-taught Symbolist. Odilon Redon (1840-1916) trained in Bordeaux, outside the École des Beaux-Arts, under the engraver Rodolphe Bresdin and the botanist Armand Clavaud.
- Twenty years of “noirs” (1870-1890). Charcoal drawings and black-and-white lithographs, brought before the public with the album Dans le rêve in 1879.
- Fame that came from literature. In 1884, Huysmans made him the cult painter of the Symbolists in his novel À rebours.
- The turn to colour. From 1890 onward, luminous pastels and oils took precedence, though the shift unfolded over a full decade.
- A late consecration. A room of his own at the 1904 Salon d’Automne, and forty works at the New York Armory Show of 1913.
Odilon Redon belongs to that rare category of artists whose work reads in two phases so distinct that one might take them for two different painters. Twenty years of charcoal and black lithography, then twenty-five years of pastels and oils of an almost startling luminosity. The break is real, yet it has been recounted so often as a sudden conversion that the exact chronology has suffered for it. That is the point that most occupied me in preparing this article: once the dates are placed back in order, the story becomes more interesting, and less edifying.
Biography of Odilon Redon
A slow vocation (1840-1870)
Bertrand Jean Redon was born on 20 April 1840 in Bordeaux, into a comfortable family. The name by which he would pass into posterity came from his mother, Odile, who was born in Louisiana. A frail child, he was placed first with a wet nurse and then with an uncle, at the family estate of Peyrelebade, near Listrac in the Médoc. Biographical tradition attributes this frailty to epilepsy, and the family held as miraculous the recovery that followed a pilgrimage to Verdelais in 1846. Both elements circulate everywhere, yet no medical document establishes them: I record them as family narrative, not as diagnosis.
What is certain, by contrast, is the effect of Peyrelebade. Redon spent a solitary childhood there, in a landscape of vines and undergrowth that he would himself describe as a school of chiaroscuro. From 1855 he took drawing lessons with Stanislas Gorin, in Bordeaux. Sent to Paris to prepare for a career in architecture, he failed the École des Beaux-Arts entrance examination in 1862, passed briefly through the studio of Jean-Léon Gérôme, whose academic teaching he found unbearable, and returned home.
Two encounters in Bordeaux mattered far more. The engraver Rodolphe Bresdin taught him etching and passed on to him a taste for minute, proliferating worlds: from that lesson came Le Gué, his first engraved series, printed in 1866. The botanist Armand Clavaud, for his part, opened to him both his microscope and his library, from Darwin to Baudelaire, from Lamarck to Edgar Allan Poe. This dual formation, scientific and literary, outside any school, explains to my mind why Redon never needed a movement in order to exist. In 1870 he served as an ordinary soldier on the Loire. He was thirty, and had published nothing.
The “noirs,” twenty fertile years of night (1870-1890)
Settled in Montparnasse after the war, Redon frequented the salon of Madame de Rayssac, where he met Fantin-Latour, Paul Chenavard and the composer Ernest Chausson. Fantin-Latour taught him the use of greasy crayon, which allowed him to recover on the lithographic stone the density of his charcoal drawings. This is the technical key to everything that followed.
In 1879 came Dans le rêve, an album of ten plates printed by Lemercier. Redon was thirty-nine. There followed À Edgar Poe (1882), Les Origines (1883), Hommage à Goya (1885), La Nuit (1886) and the three series of La Tentation de saint Antoine (1888, 1889 and 1896). The motif of the eye, self-contained and floating, recurs throughout like an obsession, at once an organ of knowledge and an unsettling intruder.
The year 1884 changed his standing: in À rebours, Joris-Karl Huysmans made his protagonist Des Esseintes a collector of Redon’s drawings. The novel became a Decadent manifesto, and Redon, almost overnight, the reference artist of Symbolist circles. He married Camille Falte on 1 May 1880; their first son, Jean, was born and died in 1886.
I have always found the label “noirs” a little misleading, and the vocabulary of nightmare more misleading still. Redon does not illustrate monsters; he declines to conclude. His own words say it better than any commentary:
My drawings inspire and are not to be defined. They determine nothing. They place us, as music does, in the ambiguous world of the indeterminate.
Odilon Redon, À soi-même, Paris, Floury, 1922
To my mind, this is an aesthetic position, not the symptom of a morbid temperament, as one still often reads.
The turn to colour, placed back in order (1890-1900)
It is here that most accounts, including the earlier version of this article, go astray. A tidy sequence is often presented: the bereavements, the loss of Peyrelebade, the crisis, then colour. But the dates do not line up. Jean died in 1886, Arï was born in 1889, Clavaud died in 1890, and Redon dedicated to him the album Songes in 1891. Peyrelebade, however, was not sold until 1897, seven years after the first pastels. The sale was a shock, not a trigger.
What the decade of the 1890s shows is coexistence rather than rupture. Les Yeux clos dates from 1890, and Redon went on making prints as late as L’Apocalypse de saint Jean in 1899. He would later write to Maurice Fabre that he had married colour and could no longer return to charcoal. The phrase is a fine one; it is also retrospective. On the ground, the transition took ten years.
Recognition followed the same slow rhythm. Durand-Ruel mounted a retrospective in 1894, then, in 1899, an exhibition in which the young Nabi painters gathered around their elders in a gesture of homage. In 1900, Maurice Denis placed Redon in the foreground of his Hommage à Cézanne, standing, pince-nez in hand, in the position of a master. One measures the distance travelled by looking at what those same Nabis were then painting, such as Maurice Denis’s Bathers at Perros-Guirec: an entire generation owed to him its conception of colour as emotion rather than as description.
The consecration (1900-1916)
The last fifteen years were his most serene. Redon decorated the château of Domecy-sur-le-Vault in Burgundy from 1900, the music room of the Paris townhouse of Ernest Chausson’s widow in 1902, and finally the library of the abbey of Fontfroide, near Narbonne, in 1910-1911, for his friend and patron Gustave Fayet. The two great Fontfroide panels, Le Jour and La Nuit, sum up his entire career.
He was awarded the Légion d’honneur in 1903. In 1904, an entire room at the Salon d’Automne was devoted to him, with sixty-two works, and the State acquired Les Yeux clos for the Musée du Luxembourg, then reserved for living artists: this was the true institutional seal. In 1913, André Mellerio published the catalogue of his printed work, close to two hundred pieces, and the Armory Show presented forty of his works in New York, Chicago and Boston, more than for any other artist in the exhibition.
Odilon Redon died on 6 July 1916, at his home at 129 avenue de Wagram, an unfinished oil on the easel, La Vierge. His son Arï, called up for military service, could not reach him from the front in time. He was buried at Bièvres.
What our collection shows, and what it leaves out
A word of editorial transparency. The four works by Redon published on VMuseum to date all belong to the second period, that of colour. Not a single charcoal, not a single lithograph. This imbalance reflects the state of the accessible digitised collections far more than any choice of ours, and it skews perception somewhat: the Redon seen here is the serene Redon.
The Portrait of Madame Arthur Fontaine (1901, Metropolitan Museum) and the Baronne de Domecy (c. 1900, J. Paul Getty Museum) show the society portraitist, the painter of patrons who also entrusted him with their decorative schemes. The Still Life with Flowers (1905) reveals the Redonian bouquet, never botanical, always afloat. The Evocation of Roussel (c. 1912, National Gallery of Art), a dissolved portrait of the Nabi Ker-Xavier Roussel, is the one I find most revealing: at seventy-two, Redon was still painting a face that refuses to settle. The full set is gathered on the page devoted to Odilon Redon.
His posterity rests on that persistence. The Surrealists recognised in him a precursor; the Fauves and the Expressionists owed to him the idea of a colour freed from reality. Long regarded as a marginal figure of Post-Impressionism, he recovered his place with the retrospective Odilon Redon, prince du rêve, presented in 2011 at the Galeries nationales du Grand Palais and then at the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, the first major French exhibition devoted to the artist since 1956.
Chronological landmarks
- 1840: born in Bordeaux, on 20 April
- 1855: drawing lessons with Stanislas Gorin
- 1862: fails the École des Beaux-Arts architecture examination
- 1866: first series of etchings, Le Gué, under the influence of Bresdin
- 1870: soldier on the Loire
- 1879: first lithographic album, Dans le rêve
- 1880: marriage to Camille Falte
- 1884: Huysmans’s À rebours reveals him to the Symbolists
- 1889: birth of his son Arï
- 1890: Les Yeux clos, first major works in colour
- 1897: sale of the Peyrelebade estate
- 1899-1900: Durand-Ruel exhibition with the Nabis, Maurice Denis’s Hommage à Cézanne
- 1903: Légion d’honneur
- 1904: room of his own at the Salon d’Automne, purchase of Les Yeux clos by the State
- 1910-1911: decoration of the library of Fontfroide Abbey
- 1913: Mellerio catalogue, New York Armory Show
- 1916: death in Paris, on 6 July
Frequently asked questions about Odilon Redon
Who was Odilon Redon?
Odilon Redon (1840-1916) was a French painter, draughtsman and lithographer, a leading figure of Symbolism. Trained outside the academic circuit, he worked at first exclusively in black and white, then turned to pastel and oil from 1890. Art historians situate him within Post-Impressionism.
What are Odilon Redon’s “noirs”?
The “noirs” are the body of charcoal drawings and lithographs Redon produced between 1870 and the mid-1890s. The term is the artist’s own. These works, peopled with hybrid creatures and floating eyes, do not seek to illustrate a story but to hold the viewer within the indeterminate.
Why did Odilon Redon turn to colour?
No single cause explains it. The birth of his son Arï in 1889, a spiritual evolution and the growing recognition of his work all played a part. The sale of the family estate of Peyrelebade, often cited as the trigger, in fact took place in 1897, seven years after his first major pastels.
Was Odilon Redon a Symbolist or a Post-Impressionist?
Both terms apply. A Symbolist in his subjects, his rejection of realism and his ties to Huysmans and Mallarmé, he is classed among the Post-Impressionists for his chronological position and his expressive use of colour, alongside Gauguin and Cézanne.
What are Odilon Redon’s best-known works?
Among the most celebrated are Les Yeux clos (1890, Musée d’Orsay), The Eye, Like a Strange Balloon, Moves Toward Infinity (1882), The Cyclops (c. 1914, Kröller-Müller Museum), The Chariot of Apollo in its several versions, and the Le Jour and La Nuit panels at Fontfroide Abbey.
Where can you see works by Odilon Redon?
The Musée d’Orsay in Paris holds the most important French collection, complemented by the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux and the Musée Fabre in Montpellier. Abroad, the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum hold notable groups of works. The Fontfroide decorations can be seen in situ, in the Aude.
What role did Redon play for the Nabis and the Surrealists?
For the Nabis he was a respected elder: Maurice Denis placed him in the foreground of his Hommage à Cézanne in 1900 and credited him with a decisive spiritualist influence on his generation. The Surrealists, a generation later, saw in his “noirs” an early exploration of the unconscious.
Was Odilon Redon epileptic?
Probably, but it is not established. Biographies mention frail health in childhood, often attributed to epilepsy, together with a recovery held to be miraculous after a pilgrimage to Verdelais in 1846. These elements belong to the family narrative handed down by the artist and his family, not to medical documentation.
Explore further on VMuseum
- All works by Odilon Redon
- Artist biographies
- Post-Impressionism
- Claude Monet (1840-1926), a life for light, born the same year as Redon
- Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec: The Young Routy at the Château de Céleyran
- Goya, to whom Redon paid tribute in his album of 1885
- Delacroix, the young Redon’s first admiration
Sources
- Odilon Redon, À soi-même. Journal (1867-1915). Notes sur la vie, l’art et les artistes, Paris, Floury, 1922.
- André Mellerio, Odilon Redon, Paris, Société pour l’étude de la gravure française, 1913 (catalogue of the etched and lithographic work).
- Roseline Bacou, Odilon Redon, Geneva, Cailler, 1956.
- Rodolphe Rapetti (ed.), Odilon Redon, prince du rêve, 1840-1916, exhibition catalogue, Galeries nationales du Grand Palais and Musée Fabre, Paris, Réunion des musées nationaux, 2011.
- Douglas W. Druick et al., Odilon Redon, Prince of Dreams, 1840-1916, exhibition catalogue, The Art Institute of Chicago, 1994.
- Online records of the Musée d’Orsay, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum and the National Gallery of Art.
