Odilon Redon was a French Symbolist painter and printmaker born in Bordeaux in the 19th century. He started drawing at a young age and studied architecture but switched to sculpture. After serving in the Franco-Prussian war, he moved to Paris and worked primarily in charcoal and lithography. In the 1890s, he began using pastels and oils which became his dominant media. His works featured imaginative themes and he was interested in Hindu and Buddhist religion, painting several portraits of the Buddha. Key works discussed include The Dream, Roger and Angelica, and Butterflies.

2. REDON, Odilon
Featured Paintings in Detail
(1)

3. REDON, Odilon
The Dream (also known as Thought)
1908
Oil on canvas , 73.03 x 53.98 cm
Villa Flora, Winterthur

5. REDON, Odilon
Roger and Angelica
c. 1910
Pastel on paper on canvas, 92.7 x 73 cm
Museum of Modern Art, New York

7. REDON, Odilon
Butterflies
c. 1910
Oil on canvas , 73.9 x 54.9 cm
Museum of Modern Art, New York

9. REDON, Odilon
Homage To Leonardo Da Vinci
1908
pastel, paper
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

11. REDON, Odilon
The Death of the Buddha around
1899
Pastel on paper, 49 x 39.5 cm
Millicent Rogers Collection

12. Odilon Redon
The Death of the Buddha around
1899
Redon had a keen interest in Hindu and Buddhist religion and culture. After the turn of the century, painted
portraits of the Buddha several times:
Buddha in his youth (1904)
The Buddha (1905)
The Buddha (Date unknown)
Buddha (1906)
Buddha walking among the flowers (1905)

14. Odilon Redon
Buddha in His Youth
1904
Distemper on canvas, 161.5 x 122.5 cm
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

15. REDON, Odilon
The Buddha
1905
Pastel, 90 x 73 cm
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

18. REDON, Odilon
The Buddha
Date unknown
Oil on cardboard, 56.5 x 48.2 cm
Private collection

20. REDON, Odilon
Buddha
1906
Pastel and charcoal on papel
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo

22. REDON, Odilon
Buddha Walking among the Flowers
1905
Oil on canvas
Private collection

23. REDON, Odilon, Featured Paintings in Detail (1)
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24. REDON, Odilon
Homage To Leonardo Da Vinci
1908
This work typifies Redon's approach where the real world and the dream world seem to converge in his art. This gorgeous painting represents the period when pastel and oils
became his favored media.

25. REDON, Odilon
The Dream (also known as Thought)
1908
The works of Odilon Redon quickly became a prominent part of Arthur and Hedy Hahnloser’s collection. The collectors went to meet him in Paris in 1913 and acquired The dream
from the dealer Jos Hessel. This mysterious composition was nevertheless reworked by the artist, who heightened the plastic presence of the flowers. It may be that the idea of
combining the female profile and garland of flowers came from a painting by Millet, whom Redon greatly admired.

26. REDON, Odilon
Roger and Angelica
c. 1910
In this evocation of a scene from the sixteenth-century romance Orlando Furioso, the knight Roger appears on his fiery steed to save the maiden Angelica from a horrible fate: the
dragon, with its evil inner glow, is looming at the lower left. Tendrils of threatening mist curling up from below menace the maiden, while angry storm clouds hover above. The figures
themselves are small and sketchily rendered; it is the picture's atmospheric effects, conveyed with light-and-dark contrasts and shots of dazzling color—including those of the
imposing crag on which Angelica is stranded—that create the high drama of this tension-ridden scene.
The young Redon is said to have watched the clouds scudding over the flat Bordeaux landscape where he was raised and imagined in them the fantastic beings that he would later
conjure up in his paintings, drawings, lithographs, and pastels. Roger and Angelica, executed in the last period of his career, when color had bewitched him, exemplifies Redon's
consummate ability to imbue his wildly imaginative fantasies with color, light, and shadow, using the mere strokes of a crayon.
Although this work was created in the twentieth century, it reflects the Romanticism of the nineteenth century, in which feeling triumphed over form, and color was the primary vehicle
of expression.

27. REDON, Odilon
Butterflies
c. 1910
Before 1900 Redon made drawings almost exclusively in black and white; afterward he began to focus on paintings and pastels in sensuous color. Many of his late
works in color took nature’s small beauties, such as butterflies, seashells, and flowers, as objects of contemplation and presented them with a fantastic intensity.
Redon was a Symbolist; he believed that art could transcend the everyday and open onto a marvelous world of the mind. Around 1905 he spoke of the painter’s task as
a privileged one: “Painting consists in using a special sense, an innate sense for composing a beautiful substance. To do as nature does: create diamonds, gold,
sapphires, agates, precious metal, silk, flesh: it is a gift of delicious sensuality.”

28. Bertrand-Jean Redon better known as Odilon Redon was a Symbolist painter and printmaker, born in Bordeaux,
Aquitaine, France. Odilon was a nickname derived from his mother, Odile.
Redon started drawing as a young child, and at the age of 10 he was awarded a drawing prize at school. At age 15, he
began formal study in drawing but on the insistence of his father he switched to architecture. His failure to pass the
entrance exams at Paris' Ecole des Beaux-Arts ended any plans for a career as an architect, although he would later
study there under Jean-Leon Gerome.
Back home in his native Bordeaux, he took up sculpture, and Rodolphe Bresdin instructed him in etching and
lithography. However, his artistic career was interrupted in 1870 when he joined the army to serve in the Franco-
Prussian War.
At the end of the war, he moved to Paris, working almost exclusively in charcoal and lithography. It would not be until
1878 that his work gained any recognition with Guardian Spirit of the Waters, and he published his first album of
lithographs, titled Dans le Reve, in 1879. Still, Redon remained relatively unknown until the appearance in 1884 of a
cult novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans titled, rebours (Against Nature). The story featured a decadent aristocrat who
collected Redon's drawings.
In the 1890s, he began to use pastel and oils, which dominated his works for the rest of his life.