Pandora

About this artwork

Odilon Redon's *Pandora* (ca. 1914), an oil on canvas measuring 56½ x 24½ inches, captures the mythical figure from Greek lore in a dreamlike vision. As the first woman created by the gods, Pandora was endowed with beauty and curiosity, but also tasked with guarding a jar (or box) containing humanity's ills. Redon, a leading French Symbolist (1840–1916), reimagines her here as an ethereal nude surrounded by blooming flowers, ev themes of temptation, mystery, and the blurred line between paradise and peril. This late-career work, bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1959, showcases Redon's shift from his earlier moody charcoal "noirs" to vibrant, luminous oils. Redon's Symbolist style emphasizes imagination over realism, using soft, glowing colors and fluid forms to suggest inner worlds and spiritual reveries. The large-scale canvas allows for intricate floral details that frame Pandora's serene yet enigmatic figure, blending sensuality with otherworldliness—a hallmark of his post-Impressionist evolution influenced by his admiration for Delacroix and Puvis de Chavannes. Painted amid the eve of World War I, it reflects Redon's lifelong fascination with mythology as a counterpoint to modern turmoil. For visitors, *Pandora* invites contemplation of beauty's dual nature: alluring yet fraught with consequence. Its vertical composition draws the eye upward, mirroring the myth's ascent from curiosity to catastrophe, making it a poetic gem in the Met's European Paintings collection.