The Temptation of Saint Anthony (First Series) (1888): Art, History and Details

The Temptation of Saint Anthony (First Series) (1888) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Odilon Redon (French, 1840–1916); Becquet (French); Edmond Deman.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This portfolio is one of three made by Odilon Redon inspired by avant-garde writer Gustave Flaubert’s novel The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874). Captivated by the book’s fantastical account of moralizing tests encountered by a hermit in the desert, Redon executed charcoal drawings and attempted to evoke that medium’s dense blackness in his lithographs. Based on the text’s darkly imaginative tone rather than its actual content, the works in this series present invented monsters and figures in otherworldly settings with jarring tonal variations. Although Redon felt that the prints effectively translated the surreal universe of his source material, they were largely misunderstood in his own time.

Object facts

• Title: The Temptation of Saint Anthony (First Series)
• Date: 1888
• Creator attribution: Odilon Redon (French, 1840–1916); Becquet (French); Edmond Deman
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Print
• Technique: ten lithographs
• Dimensions: Image: 19.8 x 14 cm (7 13/16 x 5 1/2 in.)
• Collection: PR - Lithograph
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 1927.477

A detail from the museum

Publisher Edmond Deman commissioned this portfolio after he saw an 1886 exhibition of Redon's work in Brussels, Belgium.

Collection credit

Gift of The Print Club of Cleveland

Further reading listed by the museum

• Yamamoto, Atsuko. Redon, His Life and Works: I Want to Know More. Tokyo: Bijutsu, 2011.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.