Initiation to Study—Two Young Ladies

Odilon Redon

c. 1905

Oil on canvas

Dallas Museum of Art

The Symbolist painter Odilon Redon was a contemporary of Claude Monet and other Impressionists; however, his artistic aims differed from theirs. His interest was not in recording the visible world around us, but the world of dreams and imagination, of mysticism and subjective experience. In this painting of an imaginary subject, a woman wearing a blue mantle takes the hand of a younger woman as if to impart secret knowledge. The muted tones and flat, patchy style give the canvas the appearance of an ancient fresco (plaster mural). Redon’s poetic and evocative canvases so captivated the organizers of the 1913 Armory Show in New York