Odilon Redon

Acquired directly from the artist by Baron Robert de Domecy (1867-1946), Chateau de Domecy, Sermizelles, Burgundy,

thence by descent in the Domecy family;

Private collection, New York;

with Marc de Montebello Fine Art, New York, by 1995;

with Thomas le Claire Kunsthan­del, Hamburg, Master Drawings, 1500-1900, 1998, no. 35,

where acquired by Diane A. Nixon

New York, The Morgan Library & Museum; Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Private Treasures: Four Centuries of European Master Drawings, 2007, no. 90 (entry by Jennifer Tonkovich);

Paris, Galeries nationales du Grand Palais; Montpellier, Musée Fabre, Odilon Redon, Prince du Rêve 1840-1916, 2011, no. 95

A. Wildenstein, Catalogue Raisonné de l'Oeuvre Peint et Dessiné, Paris 1992-1998, vol. I, p. 286, no. 726 (addenda) & vol. IV, p. 308, no. 726 (addenda)

This red chalk drawing dates to 1895, a year when Redon was increasingly exploring the possibilities of color and in which he wrote to his friend, Émile Bernard (1868-1941), of his interest in ‘sanguine’, a material that he said made him ‘calm’ and brought him ‘joy.’¹ His subject is a beautiful and enigmatic girl, seen in profile, her long hair falling over an unseen body, her attention firmly fixed on something beyond the page.

Despite its clear symbolist qualities, the drawing’s elegant line and focus on sensual feminine beauty demonstrates Redon’s keen interest - at that time - in the English Pre-Raphaelite movement, whose work had been brought into sharp focus in France when Edward Burne-Jones’s King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid (Tate Britain, London) caused a sensation at the 1889 Universal Exhibition in Paris. Throughout the early 1890s Burne-Jones and his circle, who lauded the Italian Primitives, continued to be discussed enthusiastically both in the fashionable salons of Paris and in the studios of certain artists.² In 1895 Redon made a number of sanguine drawings which clearly display a pre-Raphaelite sentiment and the present drawing has been particularly compared to his Head of a young woman (Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo), a red chalk drawing which was acquired by Dr Edward Tebb (1863-1943) on, or soon after, Redon stayed with him in London during the autumn of that year.³ The present drawing has an equally distinguished provenance having been sold by Redon to his great friend and principal patron, Baron Robert de Domecy, soon after his return to France. 

^1.Letter from Redon to Émile Bernard, 14 April 1895, cited in H.K. Stratis, Beneath the Surface: Redon’s Method and Materials, exh. cat. Chicago, Art institute, 1994-1995, p. 368 

^2.For example by the writer and society hostess, the Baroness Deslandes (1866-1929), who organized a literary and artistic salon in Paris and who, in 1892, travelled to London to meet with Burne-Jones. The following year she published an article about him in Le Figaro (7 May 1893)

^3.Wildenstein, op. cit, p. 139, no. 340