The Buddha

The Buddha from around 1904, at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, is among the most spiritually explicit of Redon's works — a representation of the Enlightened One that reflects the deep interest in Eastern philosophy that permeated Symbolist circles in Paris from the 1880s onward. Redon was drawn to mystical and transcendent subjects throughout his career, from his early lithographic nightmares to the serene spiritual visions of his later color work. The Buddha image was available to French artists through Buddhist objects in the Musée Guimet, which opened in Paris in 1889 and introduced Asian religious art to a broad public.

The Buddha figure is rendered in warm, luminous color that gives the image a quality of radiant calm quite different from Redon's early charcoal work. The pastel or oil medium — possibly mixed — is characteristic of his late technique, allowing soft, saturated tones without the harshness of pure oil pigment.