A face with closed eyes rises above a shining water

A pale androgynous face, eyes closed and head tilted slightly back, rises out of a luminous white expanse against a ground of dusty lavender-blue. The dark hair falls in two soft masses; the mouth is set; the shoulders dissolve into the light below, where a broad band of white and pale gold reads as water, or cloud, or nothing at all. Redon painted the first Yeux clos in 1890 — the year he began to move from his black charcoals into colour — and it became the emblem of Symbolist inwardness: the eye turned away from the world and toward the vision behind it.

Odilon Redon (1840–1916) spent the first half of his career working almost entirely in black — charcoal drawings and lithographs he called his noirs, full of floating eyes, smiling spiders and severed heads. In his fifties he turned to colour, and the darkness became pastel and oil of extraordinary luminosity. He is the great bridge between Romanticism and Surrealism, and the painter the Symbolists regarded as their conscience.

Printed as a museum-grade giclée on Hahnemühle fine art paper using 12-ink archival pigment printing. Available handframed in FSC-certified wood with optional float glass, or unframed. Ships worldwide with free delivery to 30+ countries.