Flowers: Poppies and Daisies

Odilon Redon · c. 1867

Medium

Oil on cardboard

Original size

19 × 23.5 cm (7 1/2 × 9 1/4 in.); Framed: 33.7 × 30.2 × 4.5 cm (13 1/4 × 11 7/8 × 1 3/4 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Romanticism

Painted with a quiet luminosity that feels almost suspended in time, this early work by Odilon Redon reveals the sensitivity to color and form that would define one of France's most original artistic voices. Redon is best known for his mysterious Symbolist visions — dreamlike heads floating among flowers, strange botanical hybrids, eyes embedded in cosmic space — but his floral paintings show another dimension of his genius entirely. Working here in oil on cardboard, he builds texture through loose, confident brushwork that keeps the blooms alive rather than fixed, the poppies and daisies seeming to breathe against their background. Even at this early stage of his career, around 1867, his instinct for color as an emotional force is unmistakable. Redon would go on to produce some of the most celebrated flower paintings in French art, and critics have long noted that he regarded flowers not as still-life subjects but as vessels for inner states — radiant, fleeting, and charged with feeling. This hand-painted oil reproduction is made one brushstroke at a time on quality canvas, preserving the warmth and spontaneity of the original rather than flattening it into a print. What you receive is a painting, not a copy.