The Gothic Window

The Gothic Window from around 1900, at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, depicts a stained-glass window in the Gothic style — a subject that allowed Redon to combine his interest in spiritual subject matter with the chromatic luminosity of his late style. Stained glass was a potent symbol for Symbolist artists: light transformed by color into something transcendent, the material and the spiritual unified in a single object. Redon's pastel or color work from this period often seems to aspire to the quality of stained glass — color as light rather than pigment, the picture surface luminous rather than opaque.

The Gothic window structure gives the composition an architectural framework — the tracery dividing the picture into sections of colored light. Redon renders the stained glass with the kind of luminous, saturated color that he brought to his floral paintings, the effect of light shining through glass conveyed through the intensity of the pigment.