Odilon Redon’s earliest charcoal drawings from around 1865 – no fewer than four of which can be found in the Van Gogh Museum collection – are closely linked by their subject matter, composition and technique. The focus here is on a majestic nature, into which small figures are inserted. As a pure landscape study, Autumn Leaves, Poplars in a Lake (cat. 1) is an exception in this regard.
Beginning in 1865, Redon exhibited his charcoal drawings at the Société des amis des arts in his native Bordeaux. By taking his first steps in the art world with landscapes of this kind, he aligned himself with the work of successful contemporary fusainistes like Maxime Lalanne (1827–1886) and Adolphe Appian (1819–1898), who had been showing their charcoal drawings at the large Salons of various French cities in recent years. Thanks to their efforts, drawings had come to be admired as works of art in their own right rather than simply as preparations for paintings.
Redon followed the example of these masters by using charcoal to achieve all manner of tonal effects and light-and-dark contrasts in his landscapes. Autumn Leaves, for example, was built up by spreading large horizontal expanses of powdered charcoal across the paper. Working from this greyish base tone, the artist emphasized certain passages and used the tip of the charcoal stick to draw in details like the dark leaves of the poplars and the clumps of grass in the foreground. He then selectively removed the drawing material with a wad of dough or gum to make the light zones sparkle: the underside of the poplar leaves, for instance, as they are blown away from the trees. A detail from Autumn Leaves, meanwhile, shows that Redon also used his fingertips moistened with fixative to remove charcoal in order to make the leaves on the scratched-in branches of a tree stand out against the dark sky (). The charcoal on his fingers was applied in turn to create dark accents in the foliage.
Redon enriched the grey and the oiled, deep-black charcoal in several of these early drawings with the generously applied tone of multiple layers of resinous fixative. Landscape, for instance, was hung up with two drawing pins so that he could apply a thick coating of Canada balsam on the back with a wide brush (). The resin mixture fixed the charcoal drawing on the front by soaking through the pores of the paper, while also forming a deep-gold patina over the next few months that lent the artist’s work the monumental weight of an Old Master and further deepened the already atmospheric lighting effects. Redon enjoyed an intimate relationship with his materials: the charcoal, for example, was closely associated in his mind with Peyrelabade, his family’s estate in Listrac (Gironde), where he produced most of his drawings. The fact that his charcoal was made from the wood of local grapevines further heightened the intimate connection between art and locus.
The four works reflect Redon’s affinity with nature. He spent the 1860s ceaselessly wandering the vast and inhospitable Peyrelabade and trekking through the Pyrenees. The young artist captured his impressions in these moody charcoal drawings. He did not execute them out of doors but later in his studio, where he sought to express his thoughts and his feelings. The drawings also echo the Romantic poems and stories he devoured and the art he admired.
He saw landscapes by Camille Corot (1796–1875) at the Salon in his native Bordeaux, for instance, and reviewed them for the magazine La Gironde. He found in them a synthesis between natural studies of visible reality and a poetic harmony (). Redon praised Corot as ‘a superior artist: a painter before nature, a poet or thinker in the studio’ and set out to follow in his footsteps. He placed majestic trees drawn from nature in imagined landscapes with reflecting pools, dark clouds or imposing crags, to which he frequently added one or two lone figures (often viewed from the rear), aligning himself in this way with the Romantic visual tradition. The figures help us contemplate a wild, inhospitable nature, while their nudity or medieval-style robes evoke mythical and religious dimensions.
Camille Corot, Passage of the Ford, Evening, 1868. Oil on canvas, 99 × 135 cm. Musée des beaux-arts de Rennes
The fact that these dimensions are never strictly narrative but through Redon have assumed a personal, more obscure and multiply interpretable meaning, has not prevented many an art historian from interpreting the works and even adding explanatory titles. Cat. 4, for instance, has been renamed Deux druides près d’un étang (‘Two druids near a pool’), while cat. 2 was known for many years as Dante and Virgil. For his own part, Redon resisted explanatory titles. He preferred purely descriptive ones which, while perhaps not doing justice to the work, nevertheless allow scope for personal interpretations and associations. To leave the meaning open and to respect Redon’s restraint, the Van Gogh Museum now uses the title Landscape for both works once again, reflecting Redon’s own neutral description in his account book.
When Andries Bonger acquired the drawing from the artist in 1901 and asked after its title, Redon would go no further than Landscape, a title he also gave to another work acquired at the same time (cat. 3): ‘You are concerned about titles; I always bestow them with a certain anxiety; I find that they determine either too much or too little. […] and the others are landscapes from my very distant youth’, he wrote.
Bonger’s purchase was motivated by the ‘emotion’ he had experienced on seeing a group of charcoal drawings from Charles Hillel’s collection combined in a single large frame at Redon’s 1894 exhibition at the Galeries Durand-Ruel in Paris. He asked whether the artist might put together a similar ensemble for him, prompting Redon to open his cherished portfolio of drawings for the Dutchman. Bonger travelled to Paris between April and July 1901 to select a group of drawings (two of which were cat. 2 and cat. 3). He had Redon’s regular frame-maker Jean-Marie Boyer frame them straight away with coloured mounts and ‘bordures’ ().
Cat. 2 in its original matting and frame by Boyer
Bonger added two more early charcoals to what by now was his extensive collection, one in 1913 and the other in 1934 (cat. 1 and cat. 4). Rather surprisingly, Johannes Hendricus de Bois dated both drawings to around 1880. Given the technique, style and signature, however, both can be placed much more plausibly in the 1860s. Autumn Leaves (cat. 1) shows traces of an earlier signature and date in charcoal, which were later erased and replaced in ink. Bonger had considered his collection of Redons to be complete since 1908, but made an exception for these two drawings. Writing to his second wife, Françoise, he stated: ‘I bought two last week at Debois […] in Haarlem, which I had been aware of for a long time and would not have liked to see slip into another’s hands. They are two landscapes from his youth, which already contain all the mysterious power of the later Redon. They now form a very fine cornerstone for the entire collection, which they complement beautifully.’
Fleur Roos Rosa de Carvalho
2022