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Lot Essay
In 1904 Redon began a small, innovative series of oils and pastels known as the "Wonders of the Sea," having found his inspiration for these visions in Gustave Flaubert's La Tentation de Saint-Antoine (1874), which itself was inspired by the fantastic paintings of Pieter Brueghel the Elder. Redon had previously produced lithographs based on the story in 1888 and 1896, in which Flaubert describes the apparitions living at the bottom of the sea: "The beasts of the sea, bloated like wineskins, flat like blades, serrated like saws, making their way crawling along the sand." Yet the "Wonders of the Sea" abandon these dark, haunting temptations for a dreamy, colorful underwater fantasy: "Fishes, shells, sea horses, strange plants growing on the bed of the ocean, seaweed-like growths, flowerlike abstractions, all of them as though swimming in confusion, are immersed with dreamlike preciseness in the most improbable tones, green, violet, pink, purple, white. Everything seems to be floating and yet sits so securely in its position that one would not like to move it a millimeter" (K. Berger, op. cit., p. 94).
Vision sous-marine was one of forty-four works exhibited together in the 1904 Salon d'Automne, which honored Redon alongside Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. In reviewing Redon's works for L'Echo de Paris, Gustave Babin wrote: "If you are sensitive to the charms of color, you will be struck straight away by these shimmering petals, these reflections of miraculous fabrics, these gleaming wet madrepores ...Forget everything you have read...and see here only the painter whose refined retina and marvelously sure hand make him one of the foremost artists of our time" ("Le Salon d'Automne," 14 October 1904, p. 2, quoted in T. Gott, The Enchanted Stone: The Graphic Worlds of Odilon Redon, exh. cat., The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1990, p. 19).
Arthur Fontaine, the first owner of this pastel, and his wife Marie, were close friends of the Redons, and it was at Fontaine's salon that the artist met fellow Symbolist author André Gide, the poet Francis Jammes and the composer Claude Debussy.
Vision sous-marine was one of forty-four works exhibited together in the 1904 Salon d'Automne, which honored Redon alongside Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. In reviewing Redon's works for L'Echo de Paris, Gustave Babin wrote: "If you are sensitive to the charms of color, you will be struck straight away by these shimmering petals, these reflections of miraculous fabrics, these gleaming wet madrepores ...Forget everything you have read...and see here only the painter whose refined retina and marvelously sure hand make him one of the foremost artists of our time" ("Le Salon d'Automne," 14 October 1904, p. 2, quoted in T. Gott, The Enchanted Stone: The Graphic Worlds of Odilon Redon, exh. cat., The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1990, p. 19).
Arthur Fontaine, the first owner of this pastel, and his wife Marie, were close friends of the Redons, and it was at Fontaine's salon that the artist met fellow Symbolist author André Gide, the poet Francis Jammes and the composer Claude Debussy.