Odilon Redon Prints

About Odilon Redon

Odilon Redon was born Bertrand Redon in Bordeaux in 1840 into a prosperous family; the name Odilon came from his mother, Odile. His father steered him towards architecture, but he failed the entrance examination of the École des Beaux-Arts and studied painting there only briefly, under Jean-Léon Gérôme in 1864. In Bordeaux the botanist Armand Clavaud had already sparked his lifelong interest in plants, and the printmaker Rodolphe Bresdin taught him etching and lithography. After serving in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 he settled in Paris and for two decades worked almost entirely in charcoal and lithography, the dark visionary images he called his noirs; his first album of lithographs, Dans le Rêve, appeared in 1879. He became known in 1884, when Huysmans's novel À rebours described a collector of his drawings, and in 1886 he showed at the last Impressionist exhibition. In the 1890s he took up pastel and oil, and after 1900 he made no more noirs, turning instead to flowers, myths, Buddhist subjects and large decorative panels for patrons such as Robert de Domecy and Andries Bonger. He received the Legion of Honour in 1903 and had the largest single representation at the 1913 Armory Show in New York. He died in Paris in 1916. His late pictures float rather than stand: flowers, heads and boats hover on soft, unplaced grounds, and the colour is so saturated that it reads at a distance before any subject does.