Oannès

Long before the Greeks, the Babylonians told of Oannes, a being half fish and half man who rose each day from the sea to teach the first people writing, farming and the arts, then slipped back under the waves at night. The story reached Redon through classical writers, and it stayed with him for decades. To an earlier image of the same figure he had given his own words, spoken in the creature's voice: I, the first consciousness of chaos, rose from the abyss to harden matter and to give it form. Here, around 1908, he painted the sage again in oil, a pale face held in a shell of light above dark water. Redon spent much of his life imagining creatures that never existed, and Oannes, the teacher who came out of the deep, was one he returned to more than once.