Violette Heymann

Violette Heymann is one of Redon's most celebrated pastel portraits, depicting a young woman whose name suggests the violet flowers that Redon loved to paint. The gray wove paper provides a neutral ground that allows the pastel colors to vibrate with maximum intensity, and Redon exploits this effect to create a portrait that is simultaneously a likeness and a chromatic fantasy. The face is rendered with the delicacy of a Renaissance portrait, but the flowers and decorative elements that surround it transform the portrait into a Symbolist vision—identity expressed through color rather than through physical description alone.

Redon's portraits of the 1900s and 1910s are among his most original works, combining the likeness requirements of traditional portraiture with the chromatic freedom of his late Symbolism. The pastel medium allows him to model the face with delicacy while surrounding it with the luminous color that distinguishes his late work. Violette Heymann is named for the violet—a flower that Redon associated with modesty, spirituality, and the color that bears its name.

Violette Heymann is Redon's Symbolist portraiture at its most refined: a face modeled with pastel delicacy, surrounded by flowers that are simultaneously decorative and symbolic. The name is the subject—Violette, the violet flower, the color of modesty and spirituality—and Redon paints her as the personification of her own name.