Cleveland Museum of Art

The Temptation of Saint Anthony (First Series)

Odilon Redon

Date

1888

Medium

ten lithographs

Culture

France, 19th century

Department

Prints

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

This portfolio is one of three made by Odilon Redon inspired by avant-garde writer Gustave Flaubert’s novel The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874). Captivated by the book’s fantastical account of moralizing tests encountered by a hermit in the desert, Redon executed charcoal drawings and attempted to evoke that medium’s dense blackness in his lithographs. Based on the text’s darkly imaginative tone rather than its actual content, the works in this series present invented monsters and figures in otherworldly settings with jarring tonal variations. Although Redon felt that the prints effectively translated the surreal universe of his source material, they were largely misunderstood in his own time. Publisher Edmond Deman commissioned this portfolio after he saw an 1886 exhibition of Redon's work in Brussels, Belgium.

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