A drowning face dissolves into blue beneath a bank of blossom

Ophelia lies along the lower right of the sheet, her profile pale and half-dissolved in a broad band of turquoise and deep blue water, eyes closed, hardly more solid than the current carrying her. Everything above and to the left is flowers — cobalt and sky-blue leaves, scarlet and crimson blooms, jade-green rounds, sprays of white — massed into a bank that fills two-thirds of the picture, with a wash of gold and rose sky burning behind them at the upper right. Redon made the Ophelia pastels in the years around 1905; Shakespeare's drowning girl gave him the subject he had been circling all his life, a face surrendering to colour.

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.