Woman in a Gothic Arcade: Woman with Flowers

In October 1905 Redon entered this canvas in his account book as a Gothic arcade with a woman picking a green flower. That describes the left half and nothing else. A second painting sits on the same piece of canvas, a profile fading back into a wreath of blossom, and between the two runs a bare strip where the paint simply stops. Each half carries its own signature, which is why the museum's researchers believe he meant to cut the canvas in two. Nothing else in his painted work is put together this way. He sold it whole that same month to the Amsterdam collector Andries Bonger, and by leaving it uncut he let the two pictures stand as one. The profile sinking into the background closely resembles his son Arï, then in his teens. Both halves use the same pigments, and the curve of the arch reappears, faintly, next to the head.