Vase of Flowers
Odilon Redon (French, 1840–1916)
c. 1905
- Medium
- oil on fabric
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Framed: 90.8 x 62.2 x 10.2 cm (35 3/4 x 24 1/2 x 4 in.); Unframed: 73 x 59 cm (28 3/4 x 23 1/4 in.)
- Culture
- France, late 19th-early 20th Century
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Modern European Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Gift of Roberta Holden Bole
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Little Ones profiles and older: it shows gentle subjects for the very young. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
Rapturous flower still lifes like this dominated the last decade and a half of Odilon Redon’s career and provided his greatest commercial success. His interest in plants and flowers began in his youth; child of wine producers, he grew up northwest of Bordeaux and was sensitive to fluctuations in weather, light, and temperature affecting the grape harvest. When he was 20, Redon met Armond Clavaud, a botanist and draftsman who illustrated his own compendium of flowers of the Bordeaux region. Clavaud’s meticulously rendered drawings sparked the young Redon’s imagination and helped to instill his desire to paint “nature, as seen in a dream.”
