1880 (ca.), Odilon Redon, Pond in les Landes -- Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond)
From the museum label:
Redon was born in Bordeaux, but because of health problems, he grew up under the care of his uncle in the region of Médoc in southwestern France. Although he moved to Paris to pursue a career as an artist, he returned home every summer. As early as 1868, landscape emerged as an essential genre within Redon's elaboration of his unique Symbolist aesthetic. One of his artistic goals was to "to frame a sentiment in a landscape" by subsuming descriptive images within the emotionally expressive aspects of his painting.
This painting demonstrates the kind of lyricism that Redon's poetic imagination elicited from his surroundings. As a solitary child living on his family's winemaking estate in nearby, he delighted in watching the fleeting variations of clouds pass over in their "magical brightness." The sun-tinged clouds that enliven the vast blue sky over the marshy region in this scene recall something of this enchantment, but their beauty is ambivalent. They appear nostalgic, reminders of the temporal quality of all happy moments. When Redon exhibited at the final Impressionist Exhibition in 1886, his work announced a shift in tendency among many modern artists from capturing the fleeting effects of nature toward an affirmation of subjective vision.
1880 (ca.), Odilon Redon, Pond in les Landes -- Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond)
From the museum label:
Redon was born in Bordeaux, but because of health problems, he grew up under the care of his uncle in the region of Médoc in southwestern France. Although he moved to Paris to pursue a career as an artist, he returned home every summer. As early as 1868, landscape emerged as an essential genre within Redon's elaboration of his unique Symbolist aesthetic. One of his artistic goals was to "to frame a sentiment in a landscape" by subsuming descriptive images within the emotionally expressive aspects of his painting.
This painting demonstrates the kind of lyricism that Redon's poetic imagination elicited from his surroundings. As a solitary child living on his family's winemaking estate in nearby, he delighted in watching the fleeting variations of clouds pass over in their "magical brightness." The sun-tinged clouds that enliven the vast blue sky over the marshy region in this scene recall something of this enchantment, but their beauty is ambivalent. They appear nostalgic, reminders of the temporal quality of all happy moments. When Redon exhibited at the final Impressionist Exhibition in 1886, his work announced a shift in tendency among many modern artists from capturing the fleeting effects of nature toward an affirmation of subjective vision.