“At the center of my work - wrote the artist - there is a small door that opens onto a mystery.” In the case of our painting, this “small door” opens onto a female profile, which seems to emerge like a pistil at the center of a large poppy. Redon’s faces are almost always shown in profile: partially recognizable, they remain shrouded in mystery, as if we could only glimpse a tiny portion. A work comparable to ours in subject and composition is Fleur illuminée, conserved at the Staatliche Museen in Berlin and dated around 1900. The same profile appears within a flower; the motif of the coif, recurrent in Redon’s works from the first decade of the twentieth century, is also present, applied to both female and male faces, as in Moine lisant (ou Alsace), conserved at the Kunstmuseum in Winterthur, Switzerland.

The comparison with these works, besides allowing us to date our painting to the first five years of the century, also demonstrates how present Redon is in the world’s most prestigious collections. His work is representative of French Symbolism, of which he became one of the major figures thanks to Joris-Karl Huysmans’ book À Rebours (1884), a foundational text of the movement. The protagonist, the refined Des Esseintes, withdraws to his villa far from the city, immersed in an artificial universe where Redon’s works, alongside those of Gustave Moreau, nourish his imagination and console him with their beauty.

The work comes from the collection of the dealer Roger Imbert, where it entered in 1930. It was displayed alongside two other works by Redon, Vase de fleurs and the oil on board Les Yeux clos, both from the collection of Robert de Domecy, a close friend and patron of the artist. The Musée d’Orsay now preserves the splendid decorative panels that Redon created for the dining room of the Château de Domecy-sur-le-Vault. It is highly likely that this work, along with the other two, comes from the same prestigious collection.