The Cyclops

One of Redon's most celebrated late works, 'The Cyclops' at the Kröller-Müller Museum was painted around 1914 and represents the fullest flowering of his mythological imagination in colour. The Cyclops Polyphemus peers over a rocky ridge at the sleeping nymph Galatea below — a subject from Ovid's 'Metamorphoses' that had attracted European painters since the Renaissance. What is radical in Redon's version is the treatment of the monster: where tradition made Polyphemus fearsome and threatening, Redon renders him with a timid, yearning vulnerability. His single enormous eye is suffused with longing rather than menace. The surrounding landscape explodes in chromatic intensity — oranges, purples, blues, and greens of hallucinatory saturation that transform the Ovidian myth into a meditation on desire, difference, and the pathos of unrequited feeling. The Kröller-Müller, with its extraordinary Post-Impressionist collection, acquired the work as a masterpiece of the European Symbolist imagination.

Oil on cardboard with a richly built colour surface combining areas of thick impasto with more transparent passages. The colour field behind Polyphemus is among the most intense in Redon's entire output — blues, oranges, and greens applied in successive layers that create a jewel-like depth. Galatea's sleeping figure is rendered in pale, delicate tones that contrast dramatically with the saturated background.