Breton Village

A row of stone cottages rests along the horizon in this 1890 landscape by Odilon Redon, their steep roofs pressed close together beneath a soft, pale blue sky. The scene shows a village in Brittany, the wild coastal region in northwestern France that pulled in artist after artist during the late 1800s. Redon laid down the paint in loose, unhurried strokes, letting a wide field of golden grass fill most of the foreground. The whole picture carries a warm, drowsy stillness, like an afternoon when nothing much is happening and no one seems to mind.

Odilon Redon is a surprising name to find attached to something this calm. For much of his life he built his reputation on dreamy and unsettling images, floating heads, odd creatures, and dark charcoal drawings he nicknamed his "noirs," or black works. Against that strange and shadowy world, this sunny Breton village feels almost startlingly ordinary. That is part of its charm, though. Even an artist whose mind ran toward the fantastic clearly enjoyed setting up outdoors and painting plain stone houses under a summer sky, giving us a gentler glimpse of who he was.