Odilon Redon

French · 1840–1916

French Symbolist artist whose charcoals, pastels, and lithographs created a strange interior world of floating eyes, floral figures, and mythological hybrids. Redon worked against the prevailing naturalism of his era to explore the life of the imagination, bridging 19th-century Symbolism with early abstraction and providing a direct source for the Surrealists.