L'apparition

Redon gave this painting the plainest possible title, The Apparition, and the plainness is the point. He shows no named saint or god, only a luminous figure that seems to surface out of coloured haze, glowing gold against darker tones, with no story attached that he cared to name. Much of his life's work behaves this way. He called his imagined beings visions rather than illustrations, figures that arrive from somewhere just out of reach and ask only to be looked at. Standing in front of it you are meant to feel a presence appearing and to supply the rest yourself. The colour does most of the work, the warm light gathering into a shape before it quite settles into one.