1892
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Princess Maleine (The Little Madonna) is a 1892 by Odilon Redon, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
A pale girl in a white dress floats against a dark background, her face soft and dreamy. The lines are light, almost like pencil sketches, with smudged shadows around her. This is Princess Maleine from a play by Maurice Maeterlinck, a writer Redon admired. The artist used drypoint—scratching lines into a metal plate—to create the feathery texture. The plate wears down with each print, so later copies look softer than the first. If you like this ghostly style, look up *sfumato*.
Although Odilon Redon was best known for his lithographs, he created nearly 30 prints using etching throughout his career. Here, he depicted Princess Maleine, the protagonist of a tragic drama by avant-garde playwright Maurice Maeterlinck, himself a collector of Redon’s prints. The young woman is represented in feathery black lines and tonal areas created using drypoint, a technique that wears down as impressions are printed.
Odilon Redon created this print by reusing the copper plate from his 1880 etching David , and the earlier image is faintly visible throughout.
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
