1888
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
First a Pool of Water, Then a Prostitute, the Corner of a Temple, a Soldier's Face, a Chariot with Two White, Rearing Horses is a 1888 by Odilon Redon, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a jumble of floating shapes: a puddle, a woman’s face, a temple corner, a soldier, and two wild white horses rearing up. Redon didn’t illustrate the story. He drew the mood—like a dream you can’t quite remember. The black-and-white lithograph feels like shadows on a cave wall, full of things that might not be real. If you like this eerie, dreamy style, look up chiaroscuro—the way artists use deep shadows and sharp light to make things feel mysterious.
This portfolio is one of three made by Odilon Redon inspired by avant-garde writer Gustave Flaubert’s novel The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874). Captivated by the book’s fantastical account of moralizing tests encountered by a hermit in the desert, Redon executed charcoal drawings and attempted to evoke that medium’s dense blackness in his lithographs. Based on the text’s darkly imaginative tone rather than its actual content, the works in this series present invented monsters and figures in otherworldly settings with jarring tonal variations. Although Redon felt that the prints…
Publisher Edmond Deman commissioned this portfolio after he saw an 1886 exhibition of Redon's work in Brussels, Belgium.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Born Bertrand-Jean Redon on 20 April 1840 in Bordeaux, the artist adopted the name Odilon from his mother, Marie-Odile.
See the richer artist page
