This early drawing by Odilon Redon shows a woman in a veil and long gown, the train of which she has folded over her forearm, walking towards us out of an atmospheric forest. The landscape is carefully conceived: structured around a mid-tone and then built up from numerous layers of charcoal. The leaves in the undergrowth have been rubbed out with a wad of gum so that they light up in the foreground. The figure of the young woman was largely done in the same way, ‘freed’ from the charcoal with gum, so that her pale shape contrasts with the dark surroundings. Her gaze is averted. The fact that we cannot see her feet beneath the long gown lends an unearthly touch to her appearance.
In the early decades of his career, Redon worked almost exclusively with black materials, which had a profound meaning for him: his identification of charcoal drawings like The Girl in the Woods as noirs emphasized how the importance of the black ‘should be respected. Nothing prostitutes it. It does not please the eye and does not awaken sensuality. It is the agent of the spirit much more than the splendid colour of the palette or of the prism.’
Despite the rhetorical emphasis Redon’s writings place on the benefits of using black over coloured drawing materials, there is still a surprising degree of colour and warmth in this charcoal drawing, which is actually more golden brown than black. While it is true that Redon worked with a wide range of grey tones and black charcoal, he brought colour into his work by choosing tinted paper as a support and applying a self-prepared fixative with a wide brush to the back of the sheet and with an atomizer on the front, so that each layer of charcoal would adhere to the paper. Redon himself played down the noir concept somewhat: ‘for the charcoal drawings which I made before them and since, were always made on paper tinted with pink or yellow, sometimes blue, thus showing my tendency or premise for colour in which I later found the utmost pleasure and which overwhelmed me with delight.’ The sheet that Redon used in this case might have been cream-coloured, but repeat applications of Canada balsam (resin) lent the work a golden-brown tone. He brushed a thick layer of the mixture onto the back of the sheet, which the porosity of the paper allowed to soak through to the front. This not only fixed the loose particles of drawing material to the sheet, but within a few months also imbued the drawing with a dull gold sheen that steadily deepened over time to create an atmospheric patina.
Interior of Kunstzaal Reckers, Rotterdam, during the Redon exhibition of 1907. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Andries Bonger Archive, S. Crommelin Bequest
The drawing’s matt-gold tone was further heightened by the choice of Redon and his frame-maker Jean-Marie Boyer in 1904 of a wide, light-gold mount and narrow bronzed frame, which must also have originally had a bright golden sheen (). Framed in this way, the drawing of the mysterious girl in a forest would have positively glowed on the wall. We can see it standing on the floor in a photograph of the Redon exhibition at Kunstzaal Reckers in 1907 (). A critic described it at the time as: ‘An entirely different kind of drawing, one of the most tonal and most to our taste, is undoubtedly the Girl Wandering in the Forest. […] How sublimely the light falls on her small figure and on the drapery of her robe, and how delicately these brush the grass, how very sober it is and how immensely rich in atmosphere and warm in colour, how beautifully bounded by the wide golden border of the mount.’
We note that the critic made no attempt at an iconographic interpretation of the drawing, although this had occurred when the work was supposed to have been shown at the 1890 exhibition of Les XX. Edmond Picard, its Belgian owner at the time, renamed the drawing in consultation with the organizer Octave Maus (1856–1919) as Yseult, or Isolde, after the medieval legend and the tale of Tristan and Isolde’s doomed love, which Richard Wagner (1813–1883) had made into an opera in 1865. It is no coincidence that besides being lawyers, both men were also Symbolist authors and so attached particular importance to a narrative element in Redon’s work. While the artist maintained close ties with the literary world, he nevertheless resisted an explicit explanation of this drawing. He might have placed the mysteriously illuminated figure of a young woman in her pale robe and veil in the dark forest to evoke associations with a distant Gaulish past or with medieval legends, but he preferred not to reveal his immediate sources of inspiration. The elasticity of his figures and their interpretation is apparent from the related drawing Marguerite hantée of 1872, in which what appears to be the same young woman, now turned sidewise, is assailed by the demonic Faust (). Redon returned to the motif in 1894 in the lithograph Hantise, which Bonger also owned and is now in the Van Gogh Museum collection. In this instance, Faust has been replaced with more personal demons springing directly from the artist’s imagination. The landscape has also disappeared, leaving behind an empty, bare and dark space ().
Odilon Redon, Hantise, 1894. Lithograph in black on chine collé on wove paper, 36.6 × 22.9 cm. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (State of the Netherlands), p0875N1996
It is clear from Redon’s reply to Maus that Isolde did not feature in his repertoire, as he states drily that he has no memory of the drawing ‘that you refer to as Isolde’. The artist’s response did not stop Picard describing the drawing in downright narrative terms in the catalogue for the sale of his collection in 1904: ‘Dressed in white robes, concerned and alert, Isolde awaits Tristan in a mystical forest.’
Andries Bonger made the most of this sale, taking the opportunity to supplement his collection at a stroke with several important charcoal drawings by Redon, which were difficult to get hold of by that time. The Girl in the Woods had been scratched by a shard of glass in a broken frame, and when Bonger wrote about the damage, Redon agreed to retouch the drawing. The artist told the collector that his sensibility had changed so much in the ‘some thirty years’ that had elapsed since he had made it that his intervention had respected the drawing ‘as if it were by some other being’.
Redon’s reference to ‘some thirty years’ has since prompted a strict dating to 1874. The use of materials and technique are, however, entirely in keeping with those of his early landscapes in the 1860s, which – combined with the related drawing of 1872 – renders a slightly earlier dating between 1870 and 1872 more plausible. This would make it a first translation into charcoal of the women in gowns placed in desolate landscapes that populate his somewhat earlier pencil drawings.
Fleur Roos Rosa de Carvalho
2022