Still Life with Flowers

Odilon Redons Still Life with Flowers from 1905 is an oil painting that exemplifies the artists late turn to the subject of flowers, a genre in which the Symbolist master of dark visions discovered a chromatic richness and decorative beauty that surprised his contemporaries and continues to astonish viewers today. Redon, who had spent decades producing charcoal drawings and lithographs of fantastic and nightmarish subjects that he called his noirs, began painting flowers in oils and pastels in the 1890s and 1900s, transforming the humble genre of the still life into a vehicle for the most vivid and sensuous color that any painter of the period achieved. The year 1905 places this painting in the final years of Redons life, when he was producing some of his most radiant works, and the flowers in the painting, which appear to float against a vague atmospheric ground rather than resting on a tabletop, have the quality of a dream or vision rather than a description of a specific bouquet. The oil on canvas medium, applied in the stippled and scumbled surface that Redon developed for his late paintings, creates a chromatic vibrancy in which each flower seems to emit its own light, as if the act of painting had transformed the physical flowers into pure color sensations.

Redons late flower paintings are among the most beloved works of late 19th-century French art, and their influence on the development of Symbolist and decorative painting extends from the Nabis to the Fauves. Still Life with Flowers demonstrates that the Symbolist master of dark visions was also one of the great colorists of his period.

A 1905 oil painting by Redon of floating flowers against an atmospheric ground, transforming the still life genre into a vehicle of Symbolist chromatic richness and visionary sensuousness in the final years of his career.