Redon - Odilon Redon

Self Portrait, c. 1880

Oil on canvas, 46.4 x 33.3 cm. Muse dOrsay, Paris

20 April 1840:Odilon Redon is born in Bordeaux; he is sent to live with a nanny and his uncle due to ill health. He returns to live with his parents at 11 years of age.

1851:Odilon is awarded a drawing prize at school.

1852:The young Redon does his first communion.

1855:First drawing lessons with the painter and watercolourist Stanislas Gorin with whom he discovers the works of Jean-Franois Millet, Jean-Baptiste Corot, Gustave Moreau, and Eugne Delacroix.

1857:His parents send him to Paris to study architecture. He divides his time between Paris and Bordeaux. He befriends the botanist Armand Clavaud who introduces him to Charles Baudelaire, Charles Darwin, Gustave Flaubert, and Edgar Allan Poe.

1862:Redon fails his architecture exams at the cole des Beaux-Arts.

1864:The young painter joins Jean-Lon Grme in his studio but the two artists do not understand each other artistically.

1865:In Bordeaux, Redon completes an apprenticeship with the painter and engraver Rodolphe Bresdin who introduces him to the art of printing and engraving.

1870:He joins the army to take part in the battles of the Loire Valley during the Franco-Prussian war.

1870-1895:Redon works primarily with charcoal and lithography; he draws imaginary subjects which he calls his noirs.

1878:First trip to Belgium and Holland. Redon sees the work of other artists such as Hals, Rubens, Rembrandt, and Drer.

1879:Redons first album of lithographies In the Dream. This was followed by other albums such as To Edgar Allan Poe, The Origins, and Hommage to Goya.

1880:Odilon Redon marries Camille Falte, from Runion island, in Paris.

1884:He exhibits at the first Independent Artists Salon. Huysmans publishes Against Nature with a section dedicated to Odilon Redon.

1886:Birth of Redons first son. He dies aged just six and a half months.

1889:Birth of Redons second son, Redon finds happiness again. His first exhibition is in Holland at the Nederlandsche Etsclub in Amsterdam.

1890s:Odilon Redon abandons his noirs and sets to work with colour using oil and pastels.

1894:First big retrospective at the Durand-Ruel gallery. It is described as an artistic manifestation.

1899:He is introduced to the Nabis by Maurice Denis.

1904:The state of France buys his painting Closed Eyes for the Muse du Luxembourg. An entire room is dedicated to Redon at the Autumn Salon and is a public success.

1913:Andr Mellerio publishes a catalogue of his etchings and lithographs. The same year, the Armory Show in New York displays 40 pieces of his art.

6 July 1916:Odilon Redon dies aged 72 due to a pulmonary oedema.

I made art according to myself. I made it with my eyes open to the wonders of the visible world, with the constant worry of obeying the laws of nature and life, and whatever else can be said about it. I also made it with the adoration of some masters who lead me to the cult of beauty. Art is of supreme importance, elevated, salutary, and sacred, it blossoms; for the amateur it only produces a delicious pleasure, but for the artist, it creates with tormentnew seeds from the grain.

I seem to have meekly surrendered to the secret laws which have led me to shape, somehow as best I could, and according to my dreams, the things which I fully threw myself into. If this art has come against the art of others (which I do not believe it has), it has given me an audience that withstands time, and friendships of quality and kindness which are sweet and rewarding. The remarks I make here will help more with the understanding of the art than of all I could say about my concepts and technique. Art also partakes in the events of life.

This will be the only excuse to talk exclusively about myself.

My father would often say to me Look at these clouds, do you make out the changing shapes like I do? And then he would show me in the changing skies apparitions of strange beings, wild and wonderful. He loved nature and would often talk to me of the pleasure he felt in the savannas, in America, in the vast forests he would clear. Born on the outskirts of the small town of Libourne, he left for New Orleans when he was young, at the time of the wars of the First Empire. His ambition was to make his fortune to return to his homeland so as to live a life in comfort, which no longer existed at that time.

After having explored and cleared forests, he quickly amassed a large enough fortune and married a French woman. Five or six years into their marriage, with me, the second fruit of their union, already conceived and about to be born they returned to France. It was a few weeks after their return that I entered the world in Bordeaux on the April 20, 1840. I was brought to a nanny in the country, to a place which had a great deal of influence upon my childhood and youth.

In this place I speak of, situated between the vines of Mdoc and the sea, you are alone. The ocean which once covered these deserted areas has left a whisper of abandonment in the dryness of the sand. It is across these arid plains that I passed for the first time as a child, before being fully conscious and aged just two days old. I have crossed them many times since: the oxen were replaced by horses, and then the horses by the iron on the tracks along with the engines of the modern world which I do not denounce.

In these regions of Mdoc my father owned an old estate surrounded by vines and uncultivated land, with large trees, eternal brooms, and heather close to the chteau. I was confined there in that old manor, after the nanny was no longer needed, under the charge of an old uncle, the keeper of the estate, whose good-natured blue-eyed features hold a special place in the memories of my childhood. If I try to relive those memories to the point of reviving faraway states through a consciousness that is now defunct, I become weak and sad.

Butterflies, date unknown

Watercolour on paper, 22 x 15 cm. Private collection