Odilon Redon

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Until Odilon Redon was in his fifties, he worked almost exclusively in black and white, concentrating on charcoal drawings and lithographs of subjects influenced by Edgar Allen Poe. Much of Redon's early life had been unhappy, but after undergoing a religious crisis in the early 1890s and a serious illness in 1894-95, the artist became more cheerful, expressing himself in radiant colors.

Henri Matisse admired Redon's paintings and pastel drawings of flowers, and the Surrealists regarded the elder artist as one of their precursors.