Caught between description and dream, the felt and the imagined, French artist Odilon Redon, whose career bridged the 19th and 20th centuries, transformed the natural world into nightmarish visions and bizarre fantasies. Closely allied with the
Though she first appeared in Redon's noirs, she is seen much more frequently in the artist's pastels and oil paintings. In these works Redon uses water to liquefy Ophelia's body as well as the garlands that bedeck her, causing them all to bleed (in vibrant color) into the river that is her grave.
Redon explains, "The title that occasionally identifies my drawings can be superfluous.It is justified only when it is vague, indeterminate, and even equivocal. My drawings inspire and cannot be defined. The place us, as music does, in the world of the ambiguous and indeterminate".