Odilon Redon painted a number of flower still lifes in the 1860s, at the beginning of his career, but these early works can best be characterized as finger exercises that were not intended for the outside world . After beginning to work more in colour in the 1890s, Redon took a renewed interest in the genre. He eventually made hundreds of flower still lifes, at first mostly in pastel and then increasingly in oil paint. During the summers in particular, when, like all Parisians, he left the city and escaped to the countryside, he worked from blossoming nature. The composition of his artworks began outdoors with the picking of ever different combinations of fresh wild flowers and garden blooms. Redon’s wife, Camille Falte, contributed actively to these endeavours. An undated photograph shows her busying herself with flowers in their Paris apartment . She carefully arranged them in one of the many vases they had collected over the years. One wonders, therefore, whether part of the creative process can be attributed to her, as so beautifully described by the critic Arsène Alexandre: ‘But here it happens that little by little the artist sees coming towards him a thousand other flowers, just as earlier he felt himself brushed by the wing of the nasty denizens of the night air. Then he welcomes them with decisive joy, he throws them by the armful onto the canvas or the paper, in oil or in pastel. He puts some of them in beautiful vases, in fabulous heaps. Everything sings and rejoices; with the flowers, as they appear to us in the hours of our elation, Odilon Redon mixes, without seeming to, others that are imaginary and blend with the scent of the other, unknown aromas.’
Odilon Redon, Poppy and Bindweed, c. 1867. Oil on cardboard, 32.5 × 25 cm. Private collection
By constantly varying the combination and quantity of flowers, as well as the vases that held them, and by placing the vases against differently coloured backgrounds, Redon (and Camille) continually arrived at new compositions, even though a certain amount of repetition was inevitable. Redon took great pleasure in producing his intensely colourful works, but there is another explanation for his large output of still lifes: not only did they find enthusiastic buyers within the group of collectors who were already devoted to him, but they also attracted new clients. Thanks to his flower still lifes, he could afford an increasingly comfortable lifestyle, which gave him and his family peace and happiness.
Andries Bonger, too, who had been following Redon’s career closely since 1894, greatly appreciated this change of direction in the artist’s oeuvre. When he and his wife Annie visited the Redons in 1902, Bonger bought no fewer than five recently painted still lifes, including Roses in a Vase (cat. 24). The purchases were immediately given a prominent place in the Bongers’ new house on the Stadhouderskade. By contrast, the collector’s ‘substantial purchase’ and subsequently full walls led to large ‘empty spaces’ on Redon’s walls, and this set him to work ‘with renewed relish’. After Bonger’s second large purchase of still lifes, including White Lilac, at Redon’s exhibition at Galeries Durand-Ruel in 1903, Redon again wrote that his recent success had stimulated him ‘to do a great deal more painting’ (cat. 25).
Bonger seized a third opportunity to buy paintings in 1905, again during a visit to Paris. At the Redons’ he found the smaller Vase of Flowers against a Blue Background (cat. 27), and when he and Redon took a look around the Galerie Druet, he fell for the sumptuous painting The Black Bowl (cat. 26). He reserved both of them on the spot and did not even enquire about the prices until after his return to the Netherlands. He wrote to the artist: ‘I should very much like you to withdraw from Druet’s the flowers that I saw there. I was much struck by them in memory, when I saw my rooms again. It sets a completely different note.’
Bonger used this musical term to refer to the ‘ensemble’ of Redons he was composing on his walls: a veritable piece of music in which he sought both harmony and variation. Redon replied that his commercial success had given him great happiness and had stimulated him to paint without let-up and with ‘more and more pleasure’ during his summer holiday at Villa Goa. Bonger’s eagerness as a collector who, as it were, snatched up the still lifes almost before the flowers had wilted, therefore had a direct influence on the artist’s output, and provided the impetus for Redon to step up his production of still lifes.
Flower still lifes represent a substantial proportion of the work by Redon in Bonger’s collection. In 1908, when Bonger decided that his collection was complete, he owned eighteen flower pieces by Redon: six in pastel and twelve in oils. The artist must have been able to produce some of these works, such as the smaller still lifes against a uniform background, in a relatively short time. He always built them up in the same way and used a limited number of pigments. For example, the various yellow flowers in Vase of Flowers (Green Vase with Poppy) (cat. 23) were all painted with the same yellow hues. To enliven the uniform background and to lend this work some depth, Redon let the blue proceed subtly from dark to light. In the background of Vase of Flowers against a Blue Background, lilac, grey and brown are discernible, but these passages, too, seem to have been painted rather quickly.
White Lilac was laid in very rapidly indeed. Redon painted it on a previously used canvas, which he simply covered with a uniform grey background. Again, he painted the lilacs and daffodil fairly rapidly. Nevertheless, he succeeded ingeniously in capturing the precise nature of the lilac by applying layers of various blended colours, ending with a few telling touches in heightened white. As is often the case with his flower still lifes, the canvas was originally larger, but Redon put it on a smaller stretcher, causing the rather abrupt truncation at the lower edge.
The small flower still lifes demanded relatively little of the artist’s time and attention, but The Black Bowl is a different thing altogether. Redon used a much richer palette, subtly alternating radiant and more subdued passages and giving each individual flower its own colour scheme. The bowl in which he placed his bouquet is built up of numerous pigments and therefore anything but pure black. The artist chose a type of ground that absorbed the oil from his paint, allowing him to achieve a distinctly matt effect that resembles pastel. Redon decided ahead of time where he wanted each flower and each stem, and he left these places open when applying the background. Because the canvas is still visible around the flowers, the whole bouquet has room to breathe and even has a kind of aura. As finishing touches, Redon placed a few unerring accents to bring out individual petals and stalks.
The choice of frame also makes clear that The Black Bowl is the masterpiece of the group . Both Redon and Bonger attached great importance to the framing of the flower still lifes, which they discussed at length in their correspondence . During Bonger’s visits to Paris, the artist and collector went together to see Boyer, their regular frame-maker, to find a suitable frame for each work. Often this resulted in fairly narrow profiles with no inlay , and ). The simple effect this produced seems to have been a deliberate choice on the part of the artist.
In fact, most of these frames were not of outstandingly high craftsmanship. Redon was generally satisfied with industrially produced bronze profiles sold by the metre. An exception to this, therefore, is the beautifully finished cream-coloured frame that Redon chose, in consultation with Boyer, for the flowers in a black bowl. After returning, Bonger wrote to the artist: ‘The flowers in a bowl are in exquisite taste. The frame matches them wonderfully. It’s a thing of such refinement that I shall be at my wits end to find a suitable place for it. We need a new house, as a matter of urgency!’ A photograph taken around 1908 shows Bonger posing proudly in front of his still lifes, among them The Black Bowl .
Andries Bonger in his home at 22 Vossiusstraat, Amsterdam, 1908. Private collection, The Netherlands
Redon’s flower still lifes were well received at the exhibitions to which Bonger lent them. In the Netherlands, a selection of the still lifes was shown at the retrospective exhibition held at Kunstzaal Reckers in 1907. They were widely praised in the reviews and described as accessible, entry-level works that could prepare viewers for Redon’s darker creations. Conrad Kikkert wrote in De Telegraaf that the small still lifes provide ‘the bourgeoisie’ with a ‘foothold’: ‘They have many things that one has learned to find “beautiful”. They have “belle peinture”, something Old-Holland-like, something compassionate, polished. […] The charm lies in the perfect harmoniousness, they are understandable because the beautiful is composed of old things, one recognizes this, the composition like this, and the colour like that. […] These things, and a few others, still adhere to naturalness.’
One can, in fact, see a work like The Black Bowl, with its flowers on a table in front of a dark background, as stemming from the rich tradition of still-life painting, ranging from the seventeenth-century Dutch masters to the French artists Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699–1779) and Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904). Despite the simplicity of the motif and the naturalness he shared with those artists, Redon availed himself of numerous artifices to make his flowers transcend reality. Indeed, Redon’s still lifes bear a much greater affinity to the partly observed, partly fantasized still lifes of Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) . Redon described his still lifes as ‘flowers at the confluence of two riverbanks, that of representation and that of memory. It is the soil of art itself, the good earth of the real, harrowed and tilled by the spirit.’ His spirit helped him to arrange the flowers carefully on the canvas, with ample room for each individual bloom and sufficient balance between the various forms and colours. Redon generally placed his still lifes against a background composed of various thinly applied pigments, which are as rarefied as air. The surroundings usually offer no ties to reality. The bouquets float in a vacuum and are not illuminated by any clear source of light; moreover, whenever Redon does place them on a table, as in Roses or The Black Bowl, it offers only a slight degree of orientation. In Roses in a Vase on a Small Table the table top is fully visible, but in The Black Bowl Redon painted out the area underneath the table, including its support, thereby transforming it into a kind of flying saucer. On the other hand, the reflection and the gleam on the edge of the table top in Roses seem to be the result of the artist’s keen observations.
While the Dutch critics were quick to emphasize Redon’s verisimilitude, their French colleagues struggled to define the mysticism in his flower still lifes. Claude Roger-Marx discussed in poetic terms the puzzling effect these works had on viewers: ‘We can easily understand how Redon carries us away when he deals with the great myths, communicates with the prophets and fraternizes with the demigods and heroes of fable and tragedy. But through what miracle does he manage to transfigure humble daily reality without any epic intervention?’ The critic compared the spiritual impact of the still lifes to that of music, which can move us to our very core. Instead of oil paint or pastel, Redon used, in this critic’s view, ‘the dust of butterflies or the pollen of flowers’. Roger-Marx was not the only one to wax lyrical about Redon’s still lifes in an effort to do justice to their effect. Marius-Ary Leblond devoted numerous pages to florid descriptions of the works. It is interesting to note that, despite his somewhat formulaic approach, Redon succeeded time after time in imbuing his still lifes with something intangible yet irresistible. Another critic, after admiring the Redon room at the Salon d’automne of 1905, where The Black Bowl was among the works on display, wrote: ‘M. Odilon Redon is a painter of flowers as they are seen in dreams.’
Fleur Roos Rosa de Carvalho
2025