Odilon Redon: Vision sous-marine (c1904)

Odilon Redon (1840-1916) Vision sous-marine or Paysage sous-marin pastel on buff paper 23 7/8 x 19 5/8 in. (60.5 x 49.9 cm.) Drawn circa 1904, Image Source: Christie’s

“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).”
READ FULL ESSAY: Christie’s

Odilon Redon at wikiwand

Fleur Roos Rosa de Carvalho, ‘Decorative panels’, in Odilon Redon
and Andries Bonger: 36 works from the Van Gogh Museum collection,
Amsterdam 2022, FREE PDF HERE