Odilon Redon

The life of Odilon Redon,
scene by scene

1. 1840Bordeaux

   In April 1840 a baby boy is born in Bordeaux. His name is Bertrand-Jean, though the world will know him as Odilon. Soon after his birth he was sent away from his parents to Peyrelebade, the family estate in the Médoc, where an elderly uncle raised him.

   It was a lonely house among vineyards and rough fields. The boy was sickly and spent long stretches on his own. Redon kept going back to Peyrelebade as an adult, and the Musée d'Orsay owns his painting of the road leading to it.

2. 1865Bordeaux

   At twenty-four, Redon is back home after a failure in Paris. In 1864 he had joined the studio of the famous painter Jean-Léon Gérôme. Teacher and student did not understand each other at all, and it did not last.

   In Bordeaux he found a different kind of teacher: Rodolphe Bresdin, a poor printmaker who filled his plates with dense tangles of leaves and rocks. Bresdin taught him etching. Around the same time the botanist Armand Clavaud became his friend and opened up science and literature to him.

3. 1879Paris

   At thirty-nine, Redon publishes his first album of lithographs, In the Dream, a set of ten prints. They are entirely black and white, full of strange faces and drifting heads.

   On May 1, 1880, he married Camille Falte. She came from the island of Bourbon, now Réunion, in the Indian Ocean, and they had met in a Paris salon. Camille stayed at his side for the rest of his life.

4. 1884Paris

   In 1884 the writer Joris-Karl Huysmans publishes Against Nature. Its hero, des Esseintes, is a nobleman who shuts himself away with only the books and pictures he loves. Among the pictures on his walls are drawings by Redon.

   The novel caused a stir, and Redon's name traveled with it. The painter of black dreams, known to only a few, now had admirers among young writers and poets. An 1888 edition of the book opened with a Redon lithograph as its frontispiece.

5. 1886Paris

   In May 1886 Redon and Camille have their first son, Jean. That same year Redon showed work at the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition. But baby Jean died about six months later.

   Three years on, in 1889, a second son, Arï, was born. Arï lived a long life and later looked after his father's work and papers, helping the world get to know them.

6. 1897Peyrelebade

   Peyrelebade, the estate of his childhood, passes into other hands. Family money troubles forced the sale. Redon had returned there again and again all his adult life.

   From about this time the black begins to drain out of his work. He turns more and more to pastel and oil, to flowers, butterflies, and bright skies. The era of his black drawings was coming to a close.

7. 1900Domecy

   Baron Robert de Domecy, who lived in a château in Burgundy, gives Redon a large commission: to cover the walls of his dining room with paintings. From 1900 into the next year Redon filled them with huge panels of floating flowers, leaves, and vines. They are now in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

   He began Etruscan Vase with Flowers in these same years. A reddish brown ancient vase painted with black figures holds purple buds and a big brown bloom.

   Painted around this timeEtruscan Vase with Flowers
8. 1916Paris

   In 1913 a group of his works crossed the Atlantic to the Armory Show in New York. The collector Lillie P. Bliss bought several of them there.

   Three years later, on July 6, 1916, Redon died in Paris at seventy-six. Bliss's collection later went to the Museum of Modern Art. This vase painting was part of it, and it came to the Metropolitan Museum in 1953.