Guardian Spirit of the Waters

1878

Charcoal and black chalk on paper, 46.6 × 37.6 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago

A huge head with a single wide eye drifts above the sea. The drawing takes ordinary elements, a face and a horizon, and makes them strange.

Rubbed, erased and scratched charcoal builds the head out of shadow. Here black serves imagination rather than observation, a shift toward picturing inner life.
It appeared in the Art Institute's Strange Realities exhibition (2025–26).
Look lower right: a tiny sailboat gives the head its vast scale.
He also used sponging and touches of white chalk.
The Art Institute bought it in 1950 from Henri Petiet.

Black remained his chief medium into the 1890s. The MoMA brochure connects that preference to the shadows that had fascinated him as a boy.

Noirs: The artist's name for his black charcoal drawings and lithographs of the 1870s to 1890s.