A veiled watcher behind a great sweep of poppies

At the upper left a figure in blue-green, long-haired and half-veiled, looks out with an expression somewhere between sorrow and attention; the rest of the panel is given to an enormous arc of flowers — scarlet poppies, yellow and orange blooms, round green leaves, a scatter of pale petals — swinging across an ochre and gold ground toward the lower right. Nothing is explained. Redon called it simply Mystery, and it belongs to the last decade of his life, when the flower pieces and the visionary heads became the same subject.

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.