Scrivo sol per sfogar l’interna doglia.
He was greater. He wrote selflessly.
It was in Bordeaux, a letter informs me, that Redon was born, instead of Marseilles.... He seems to have possessed a noble nature, with a peculiarly personal quality of penetration. He stood face to face with basic emotions.
He declares the dilettante amuses himself, while the artist, going through agony, produces grain for broader sowing. Mixed with his love, his knowledge of art, there was reverence.
He explains how memories of what his father used to tell him in childhood helped him. Of his father, he remarks: “He loved the outdoor world. He talked often about the pleasure the great spaces of America gave him, and forests, where once he was lost for days. He liked to recall the wild life of his youth, this daring follower of luck and liberty.” His father was in New Orleans at time of the Wars of the First Empire.
In his sensitive childhood, Brittany made him sad. He explains that in Celtic lands the human soul has accumulated too much emotion. The passion of days, of years, is piled there, until material things become uncannily imbued. Hence the wealth of legends. Legends and poetry become the permanent safety vault of the agony, of the desires, of a race.
Once he pauses to praise the wines of France. He blesses men who grow the grape, who make precious liquid to dilute bitter fate with a little optimism. He calls it liquid of dreams. He rejoices that there is something that can exalt mind.
He tells of his first art teacher who did not try to teach. He kept still and rejoiced when the boy went mad over the canvasses of Delacroix. From that man, he declares, I learned the essentials of creation.
I have found another reason for his devotion to flowers. In his impressionable boyhood he became companion of a famous botanist, Clavand. This man was fascinated by the imperceptible, unsteady boundary line which separates flower-life from human-life. In the plastic arts, Clavand could appreciate both the serenity of Greece and the riotous Middle Age. He loved Delacroix just as Redon did. He kept telling Redon, the boy, of the intensity of life, the vital irradiation of the canvasses of Delacroix. He compared them to the plays of Shakespeare, because they held the same quality. In stored up depth of life they were Elizabethan.
Redon expresses belief that there is no such thing as art until pressure of idea, vision, force then form speech.