Getty Museum

Head of a Young Girl in Profile

Date

1895

Medium

Fabricated red chalk, on gray prepared paper

Culture

French

Department

Drawings

Institution

Getty Museum

Object ID

43d39248-0c4b-4fdd-8d79-c16a1636b336

Composed in two shades of red chalk, this delicate drawing features the head of a young woman in profile. She gazes downward with a vacant expression, long hair draped around her in a soft curtain of powdery chalk. Known for his monochromatic noir drawings built from various shades of black media, Redon unexpectedly began exploring the expressive potential of color in the 1890s. He wrote to his friend, the artist Émile Bernard in 1895, “How different color is; I am making pastels, at this moment, and also sanguine (red chalk) drawings, this pleasant material, which claims me and brings me joy.” These first tentative experiments in color presaged the explosion of radiant hues that would dominate his oeuvre in the following decades. Disembodied heads and portraits in profile were among the artist’s principal subjects and feature in nearly all of his known works in red chalk. A similar study of a young woman, also executed in a combination of red shades on gray paper, is in the collection of the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo. These sanguine studies of young women are an extension of his previous drawing practice in black chalk, but also reflect Redon’s brief interest in the English Pre-Raphaelite movement. In the early 1890s Edward Burne-Jones and his circle, who lauded the Italian Primitives, drew widespread attention among artists and collectors in Paris. With their elegant lines and delicate femininity, the small group of red chalk drawings Redon made around 1895 share a pre-Raphaelite sentiment. The present drawing was sold by Redon to his friend and patron Baron Robert de Domecy, who later commissioned the extraordinary pastel portrait of his wife Baronne de Domecy now also in the collection of the Getty.

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