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Lot Essay
The present work, a 38 page sketchbook which comprises 37 pencil drawings by Redon, was executed from December 1862 to February 1863. After enrolling in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1862, Redon left for the Basque country with his friend Achille Peyrun-Berron, to whom he subsequently gave this complete sketchbook. They seem to have spent most of their time in Uhart, near Saint-Palais, between Bayonne and Pau, where another friend, Henry Berdoly, had invited them to stay. Remembering the trip twenty years later Redon insisted that it took place in 1861 but the dates inscribed by the artist on many of these sheets prove otherwise. In the personal papers of André Mellerio in the Art Institute of Chicago are two works by Redon relating to this trip to the Basque country: Un séjour dans le Pays basque of 1869 and Redon's personal account of the trip, Uhart, journal, written in 1873.
Redon's trip to the Basque country may well have been undertaken in response to the increasing fame of France's oldest chanson de geste, La chanson de Roland. An immensely popular tale recited and re-enacted throughout the middle ages, this 12th Century story of courage and betrayal had been lost for almost six hundred years. Centred around the destruction of the rear-guard of Charlemagne's army by Vascons (the inhabitants of the Basque country) at Roncevaux in 778 and the death of Charlemagne's nephew Roland, this tale had only recently been published after a manuscript which had been discovered at the Bodleian Library in Oxford in 1837. Redon would certainly have known La chanson de Roland, given the Romantic movement's enormous interest in subject matters from the middle ages, and depicts in this sketchbook many of the landscapes in which the action took place.
As Redon wrote to André Bonger in 1896, 'A trente-cinq ans de distance, j'ai encore dans la rétine l'éclat fanatique et brûlant de certains regards surpris dans des villages pauvres, admirablement consumés de détresse. Autour de Pampelune, sur le plateau de la Biscaye espagnole, ce que j'y vis fut la plus décisive de mes sensations reçues; êtres et choses, tout le décor aussi, fut une vision inoubliée' (quoted in R. Bacou, Odilon Redon, vol. I, Geneva, 1956, p. 35).
Redon's trip to the Basque country may well have been undertaken in response to the increasing fame of France's oldest chanson de geste, La chanson de Roland. An immensely popular tale recited and re-enacted throughout the middle ages, this 12th Century story of courage and betrayal had been lost for almost six hundred years. Centred around the destruction of the rear-guard of Charlemagne's army by Vascons (the inhabitants of the Basque country) at Roncevaux in 778 and the death of Charlemagne's nephew Roland, this tale had only recently been published after a manuscript which had been discovered at the Bodleian Library in Oxford in 1837. Redon would certainly have known La chanson de Roland, given the Romantic movement's enormous interest in subject matters from the middle ages, and depicts in this sketchbook many of the landscapes in which the action took place.
As Redon wrote to André Bonger in 1896, 'A trente-cinq ans de distance, j'ai encore dans la rétine l'éclat fanatique et brûlant de certains regards surpris dans des villages pauvres, admirablement consumés de détresse. Autour de Pampelune, sur le plateau de la Biscaye espagnole, ce que j'y vis fut la plus décisive de mes sensations reçues; êtres et choses, tout le décor aussi, fut une vision inoubliée' (quoted in R. Bacou, Odilon Redon, vol. I, Geneva, 1956, p. 35).