The Port of Morgat

Odilon Redon is known primarily as a painter of dreams and of the human imagination. His representations abound in floating eyes, chalices filled with liquid, disembodied heads, chariots with rearing horses, and cyclopes. Yet, as with all great artists of the visual imagination, his art was grounded in a study of nature. This wonderfully melancholic landscape was painted in 1883, on Redon's second trip to the coast of Brittany. Redon was attracted to Brittany because of its mystery, its Breton language, and its "primitive" people and customs. He referred to Brittany as a "marvel of solitude and sadness" in a letter written to his friend, Emile Hennequin, in the town of Crozon, where he was staying (Auriant 1935, 2).

The fishing village of Morgat is located about two miles from Crozon, and Redon visited it many times during his stay in Brittany. When walking to Morgat, he often took both a sketchbook and a small drawing board, and worked to transcribe the buildings, rocks, dunes, and people of this desolate part of France. (A sketchbook and several painted studies from these trips are now in the Musée d'Orsay, and other painted studies can be found in the Woodner Family Collection, New York.) Of the landscapes from 1883, the Reves picture is the largest and most complete, representing in one work several motifs that Redon had already studied separately: the rocks, the fishing boat, and the granite-walled houses of the village. As is always the case with Redon's painted landscapes, this scene is unpeopled; thus we are not allowed to identify with the landscape or to know how distant or how large it is. The town itself has a muffled presence in the landscape, which seems more insistently directed to the boat, the reflective water of the port, and the great black rock of the foreground. The very part of the port that should be populated and alive is hidden from us by the large rock. Redon also chose to represent the scene in an odd, irrational light. The sky is a spaceless blue, populated by large, heavy clouds. Although the sky clearly provides light to the landscape, Redon constructed the picture so that the lightest areas are not above, but in the reflective surface of the water in the center. And by casting a dark shadow over the entire foreground, he further exaggerated the brilliance of the light on the water.

The painting can be interpreted as a sequence of hidden and mysterious forms, none of which can be clearly defined. The fishing boat is beached, the village deserted, the port empty of activity, the beach dark, and the sky filled with wind. A tiny windmill churns on a distant hill, an emblem of isolation and endurance.

"Impressionist Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture from the Wendy and Emery Reves Collection," page 87