Arbres sur un fond jaune

Odilon Redon's 'Arbres sur un fond jaune' (Trees on a Yellow Background, 1901) is a late work from the painter who had moved from his black-and-white charcoal 'Noirs' to a rich, hallucinatory color that was uniquely his own. His tree subjects combined the natural world's specific forms with his characteristic transformation of those forms through expressive color and light — the yellow ground against which the trees were placed creating a luminous, otherworldly atmosphere quite different from any naturalistic treatment of the subject.

Redon renders the trees against the yellow background with his characteristic visionary color — the golden-yellow ground creates a luminous, radiant atmosphere that transforms the natural subject into something approaching the luminous space of the icon or the dream. His handling of the trees' forms against this extraordinary color achieves the synthesis of observed natural form and pure color sensation that characterized his mature pastel and oil work. The compositional simplicity allows the color relationship to do all the pictorial work.