Odilon Redon Poster - The Cyclops

A one-eyed giant rises above a hillside ablaze with violet, ochre and emerald. With a gaze more melancholy than menacing, he contemplates the nymph Galatea, asleep and unaware among the flowers. Painted around 1914, The Cyclops is one of Odilon Redon's most haunting masterpieces, and a perfect example of how the symbolist master turned ancient myth into pure reverie.

The giant is Polyphemus, the very same Cyclops that Odysseus blinds in Homer's Odyssey. Here, however, Redon draws on Ovid's Metamorphoses, where the monster falls hopelessly in love with the sea nymph. The brute becomes a shy, lovelorn dreamer, hidden behind a mountain and unable to declare himself. With its vibrant, almost mosaic-like brushwork and its luminous colours, the work bridges symbolism and modern art.

Odilon Redon (1840–1916) was a French symbolist painter born in Bordeaux. After decades of dark charcoal drawings and lithographs (his famous "noirs"), he embraced colour in the 1890s, producing dreamlike pastels and oils filled with flowers, mythological figures and visions. The original painting is held at the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands.