Piety Beside a Red Tree

In August 1906, writing to the Amsterdam collector who had just bought this painting, Redon mentioned what was pinned up on his studio wall: fragments of French Gothic art, whose stone faces he found human and honest. That taste runs right through this canvas of 1905. A Gothic window hangs in mid-air above a stretch of sea, and the clouded sky behind it carries on through the glass, a little brighter inside. Under the arches, two figures in coloured robes meet beside a red tree, drawn with a few thin lines. Early exhibition catalogues called the scene an Annunciation. Redon never confirmed that, and in 1911 he refused an invitation from the painter Maurice Denis to join a show of Catholic art, saying his own work could not be traced to any one religion. Laboratory study of the canvas showed that he first signed it further to the right, then cropped it, painted the old signature out and signed again at the lower left.