Rare Vintage 1940s Redon "Vase with Flowers" Still Life Art Print

Odilon Redon’s (1840-1916) Vase with Flowers.

9" x 12” reproduction as a part of a late 1940s collection of the "World's Great Paintings" with title and commentary on reverse.

Commentary on the reverse reads:

“Flowers that might have been plucked in Paradise, beautiful butterflies and shimmering mists, faces seen in a dream, winged horses-these are some of the mysterious elements in the paintings of Odilon Redon whose canvases glow and pulsate with light and color that seem hardly of this earth. Like the great English mystic, William Blake, Redon's real world is the world of the imagination, interpreted by a master draughtsman.

Born in Bordeaux, in 1840, Redon did not easily find his medium. He failed at the Beaux-Arts. He tried architecture and sculpture, studied botany, imitated the masters of the Barbizon school, finally became interested in etching. From this he turned to lithography and in 1879, under the technical guidance of Fantin-Latour, he published his first series of prints, Dans le Rêve. Inspired by the writings of Poe and Baudelaire, he occupied himself with illustration and, working in luminous blacks and greys, created the symbolic language we associate with his name.

It was not until he was almost sixty that Redon began to work in oil, watercolor and pastel, employing all the "infinite beauties of color of the painter's palette." His long apprenticeship as a draughtsman, his training as an architect, gave even the most visionary of his paintings a remarkable security of form and design. The pastel, Vase with Flowers, surely one of the most transcendently beautiful pictures of its kind ever painted, belongs in this period. It is now in the collection of William S. Paley in New York.“ — Edwin Seaver