Les Quais à Bordeaux

Odilon Redon's 'Les Quais à Bordeaux' (The Quais at Bordeaux, 1900) is an unusual urban subject by the painter primarily associated with symbolic and visionary imagery — his engagement with the specific urban landscape of Bordeaux (the city of his birth and his early years) showed a more documentary side of his practice, the specific quayside environment of the great wine port depicted with the atmospheric sensitivity he brought to all his subjects.

Redon renders the Bordeaux quais with his characteristic atmospheric approach applied to an urban subject — the specific quality of the light on the Gironde waterfront and the quayside buildings depicted with his luminous color sensitivity rather than the atmospheric dissolution of conventional plein air practice. His handling of the urban water environment maintains the luminous quality of his symbolic work even within the more straightforwardly observed urban subject.