Apollon vainqueur du serpent Python

Odilon Redon's early 1872 painting of Apollo vanquishing the Python offers a rare glimpse of the artist working in oil at the beginning of his career, before he had developed the dream-saturated symbolist imagery that would define his mature work. The subject — Apollo defeating the great serpent Python who terrorized the region of Delphi — was a classical mythology staple. Redon engages with it at a moment when his art was still finding its direction, before the intense black charcoal and lithograph works of the 1880s. The Eugène-Delacroix National Museum holds this early work, connecting Redon to the Romantic tradition Delacroix represented.

This early Redon oil shows the influence of his training under the academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme as well as his study of Delacroix. The handling is more conventional than his later work, with the mythological subject treated through the romantic tradition of dramatic gesture and intense color.