by Odilon Redon
A soft brown shape fills the lower half of the sheet, and flowers crowd the rest of it. Odilon Redon drew the pastel in 1906 and called it Ophelia, after the young woman in William Shakespeare's Hamlet who drowns. It was given to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1973.
A large soft brown mass rises from the bottom edge and fills the lower middle of the sheet. It reads as a head and shoulder, tilted to the left, drawn as a silhouette in shadow. Redon gives it no face, no hands and no water.
Everything above and beside it is flowers. White clusters bank up behind the head, a spray of orange leaves with green veins hangs at the center, and deep blue rounded blooms sit in pairs. Three pink stems rise from behind the spray and arch off the top and right edges. Dark green fronds edged in yellow stand at the right and at the lower left, with a cluster of blue spikes rising on the left. Patches of sky blue show through at the top.
The museum records the paper as blue-gray; in reproduction the bare areas read as warm tan. Redon left a good deal of it bare, especially down the left edge and across the bottom. He signed the sheet in pencil at the lower right.
Ophelia is the young woman in William Shakespeare's Hamlet who drowns. The National Gallery in London, which owns a second Redon pastel of her, calls the pairing of young doomed beauty with dreaming, sleep and death a common theme in nineteenth-century art and writing, especially in the closing decades.
Redon returned to the subject more than once. The National Gallery in London holds his pastel Ophelia among the Flowers, made about 1905 to 1908, and sets out what he does with her. She is drained of color while the flowers around her are not. Her closed eyes leave it open whether she is dead or only asleep, and she merges with the plants. The London sheet shows her head alone, tipped back near the edge of the picture.
The Chicago pastel takes that further. There is no face at all to read, and nothing marks the place as a stream. What the title supplies, the drawing withholds.
The pastel passed through Joseph Hessel and then César de Hauke in New York before reaching Chicago. John H. Winterbotham owned it by 1928, the year it appeared in a Redon exhibition in the city as number 22. In April 1931 the magazine Parnassus listed it among the important Redons then in the United States, and in November 1938 it hung at the Arts Club of Chicago in a loan exhibition of modern work from private collections.
In 1973 Mrs. Theodora W. Brown and Mrs. Rue W. Shaw gave it to the Art Institute of Chicago, in memory of Anne R. Winterbotham.
Alec Wildenstein's catalogue of Redon's paintings and drawings lists the sheet in volume one as number 434. Harold Joachim included it in the Art Institute's own survey of nineteenth-century French drawings in 1979, and Rick Brettell discussed it in his 1987 book on the Post-Impressionists.
It was number 38 in Odilon Redon: Prince of Dreams, the 1994 exhibition the Art Institute organized with the Van Gogh Museum and the Royal Academy of Arts.
Close reading
The subject is a shape without a face, and the flowers carry the sheet. Start with the brown mass at the center, then work outward through the blossoms that surround it.
1.The figure, given no face
A soft brown mass rises from the bottom edge, rounded at the top and notched at the right, readable as a head and shoulder in shadow. Redon draws no features, no hair and no hands.
2.The orange leaf spray
An orange-gold spray with green veining hangs directly over the head, the warmest passage in the picture. Its leaves are drawn with combed parallel strokes rather than outlines.
3.Deep blue blooms
Rounded blue flowers are scattered across the upper left in pairs, each a dense scribble with a dark center. They are the only blossoms drawn with hard edges.
4.Pink stems over the upper right
Three pink stems rise from behind the orange spray in single unbroken strokes. One leaves the sheet at the top edge and two at the right, so the flowers read as part of something larger than the picture.
5.Dark fronds at the right
Dark green fronds edged in yellow stand at the right, close in tone to the brown figure. They are the one place where the flowers and the body share a color.
6.Blue spikes at the left
Three or four upright blue spikes rise at the left edge, drawn in short vertical dashes with thin pink stems between them. With no ground or water beneath them, they hang in the same undefined space as everything else.
1928–29
Shown in an Odilon Redon exhibition in Chicago as number 22, from the collection of John H. Winterbotham.
1931
Listed in the magazine Parnassus for April among the important Redons then in the United States.
1938
Shown at the Arts Club of Chicago, 4 to 25 November, in a loan exhibition of modern paintings and drawings from private Chicago collections, as number 130.
1973
Given to the Art Institute of Chicago by Mrs. Theodora W. Brown and Mrs. Rue W. Shaw in memory of Anne R. Winterbotham; accession 1973.512.
1994
Shown as number 38 in Odilon Redon: Prince of Dreams, 1840–1916 at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Art Institute of Chicago
111 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60603, United States
Displays and loans can change. Check whether this work is on view before making a special trip.
Plan your visit on the museum’s official website (opens in a new tab)A soft brown shape that reads as a head and shoulder in shadow, with a dense mass of flowers above and around it. There is no face, no water and no stream bank; the title carries the subject.
The young woman in William Shakespeare's play Hamlet who drowns. The National Gallery in London, writing about its own Redon pastel of her, calls Ophelia the doomed heroine of the play and describes her as garlanded by flowers.
The Art Institute of Chicago, accession number 1973.512, given by Mrs. Theodora W. Brown and Mrs. Rue W. Shaw in memory of Anne R. Winterbotham. The museum files it with its drawings.
63.5 by 44.3 centimeters, or 25 by 17 1/2 inches. It is an upright sheet, about two feet tall.
Yes. The National Gallery in London holds a second pastel, Ophelia among the Flowers, of about 1905 to 1908, which is wider than the Chicago sheet and shows her head tipped back at the edge of the picture.
Pastel on blue-gray wove paper. Redon left large areas of the paper bare, so its color stands in for shadow and for the space around the flowers.
It is number 434 in the first volume of Alec Wildenstein's catalogue of the paintings and drawings, and number 38 in the 1994 exhibition catalogue Odilon Redon: Prince of Dreams, 1840–1916.
Associated with · 1906
The Metropolitan Museum of Art names Odilon Redon among the older painters who established Symbolism. The National Gallery in London, writing about his other Ophelia pastel, sets the subject in a late nineteenth-century taste for beauty joined to sleep and death.
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View artistThe sources below include collection records, catalogues, scholarly research, and primary materials that informed this page. They document Ophelia, its making, and its place in cultural history.
The holding museum's catalogue entry: medium, dimensions, inscription, provenance, exhibition and publication history.
The London pastel on the same subject, with the museum's account of how Redon handles Ophelia and the flowers.
The standard catalogue of Redon's paintings and drawings, cited by the Art Institute for this sheet.
The 1994 exhibition catalogue, in which the pastel was number 38.
An Art Institute survey of Post-Impressionist work that discusses and reproduces the sheet.
These references provide the documented foundation for this work's history and interpretation. Claim-level citations remain attached to the specific claims they support.
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