1888
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
The Temptation of Saint Anthony (First Series) is a 1888 by Odilon Redon, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
A floating eye with bat wings hovers over a desert. Below it, a saint kneels in prayer while strange creatures slither and loom. Redon made these prints after reading a weird novel by Flaubert. The book never describes the monsters—Redon just drew what the dark mood felt like. The black ink looks thick and smudgy, like charcoal. If you like these eerie shapes, look up the technique called *sfumato*.
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.
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