1888
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
It Is the Devil, Bearing Beneath His Two Wings the Seven Deadly Sins is a 1888 by Odilon Redon, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a shadowy creature with bat-like wings, its body made of swirling darkness. Tiny figures—each representing a sin—cling to its underside like parasites. Redon made this after reading *The Temptation of Saint Anthony*, a book full of strange visions. He didn’t illustrate the story directly. Instead, he drew his own nightmares, using thick black lines to make the image feel heavy and dreamlike. If you like this, look up chiaroscuro—the way artists use light and dark to create drama.
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
