Dream, Decoration and the Wider World

Symbolism in France: Puvis, Redon and Rousseau

Painters who turned from the visible world to dreams, ideas and imagined places.

In the 1880s and 1890s some French artists stopped trying to record what the eye sees. They aimed instead to suggest ideas, moods and dreams, and left the viewer to complete the meaning. Their work ranged from hushed figure painting and black prints to bright pastels and invented jungles.

• A calm, simplified figure painting that younger artists treated as a model.
• Prints and drawings in black that picture visions, evolution and literature, then a late turn to color.
• Jungle and desert scenes by a self-taught painter, built from sources found in Paris.

Symbolism

A movement in art and poetry that sought to evoke ideas and inner states instead of describing the visible world.

Works in this part

• The Poor Fisherman
• Guardian Spirit of the Waters
• The Eye, Like a Strange Balloon Moves Towards Infinity
• There Was Perhaps a First Vision Attempted in the Flower
• Death: My Irony Surpasses All Others
• Closed Eyes
• Bouquet of Flowers
• Surprised!
• The Sleeping Gypsy
• The Dream

Image: Wikimedia Commons · PD-Art