Les Parques

The three figures here are the Fates of Greek myth, the sisters who between them held every mortal life as a single thread. One spun the thread into being, one measured its length, and the third cut it, and not even the gods could overrule them. Redon painted them in 1900, at the turn of a new century, though he set them in no particular place or time, just deep colour and half-light. He rarely told a story straight. He preferred figures that hover between waking and dream, and the Fates suited him because they belong to no single moment, working quietly while everyone else lives unaware of them. What he shows is simply the three of them at their task, calm and absorbed in the thread that runs through their hands.