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Redon, Odilon 1840-1916
French painter and lithographer

Born in Bordeaux, he studied in Paris under Jean Léon Gérôme. He made many charcoal drawings and lithographs of imaginative power, including Les Yeux clos (1890, 'Closed Eyes', Musée d'Orsay, Paris). After 1900 he painted, mainly in pastel, pictures of flowers and portraits in intense colour. His Profile of a Woman with a Vase of Flowers (c.1895-1905) is in the Tate Gallery, London. A distinguished writer, he published his diaries (1867-1915) as À soi-même (1922), and his Letters in 1923. He is usually regarded as a forerunner of Surrealism because of the use of dream images in his work, as in Le Char d'Apollon (1905-14, 'Apollo's chariot', Musée d'Orsay).