An Abbey in France Discovered Previously Unknown Wall Sketches by Odilon Redon

For more than a century, a suite of murals by Symbolist painter Odilon Redon have decorated the library of the Abbaye de Fontfroide, an 11th-century former monastery in the South of France. When they were removed earlier this year for the first time since their installation to be loaned for a high-profile exhibition, a set of test drawings, until then unknown, by Redon were uncovered.

“It was a great surprise—nobody imagined the existence of these sketches,” Alexandre d’Andoque de Sériège, Abbaye de Fontfroide’s director, told ARTnews in an interview. “It amuses just to imagine Redon painting them on the wall.”

Installed upon their completion in 1911, the three paneled works—La Jour (Day), La Nuit (Night), and Le Silence (Silence)—were commissioned by Gustave Fayet. Fayet was one of the turn of century’s great French collectors, but he is now little-known. The breadth of Fayet’s holdings is now coming into view via a blockbuster exhibition, “Gustave Fayet, Collector-Designer: Icons of Modern Art,” at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, which has gathered around 250 works of the 750 works that once passed through his hands.

The drawings’ discovery was even more surprising because neither Fayet nor Redon had ever written about their existence, either in correspondence to each other or to other members of the French avant-garde. It’s possible that they might have been an initial test for a fresco, but “a fresco in the library would have required Redon to stay very long in Fontfroide. It’s also physically a very hard job,” d’Andoque de Sériège, who is also Fayet’s grandson, said. “So, I think it’s really just a painting for fun.”

That theory is supported by the fact that the newly discovered wall drawings don’t resemble the final works, which were begun in Redon’s Paris studio. “The figures are more colorful [on the wall] than the figures in panels. The shape is typical Redon, but not the choice of colors,” d’Andoque de Sériège said. “The two female figures—Madeleine and Simone [his wife and daughter]—are very tall, very important in the panels, but in the sketches on the walls they are rather small, only 30–35 centimeters high.”

Fayet met Redon in 1900 and purchased his first work by the artist the following year; he eventually came to own some 300 works of his. Fayet would visit Redon each time he took the train up to Paris, and they grew closer still when the collector’s family moved to Paris in 1905. The friendship also influenced Fayet as a painter: He started out making Realist pictures in the style of the Barbizon School before taking up the Impressionist style. When he met Redon, Fayet “moved to a sort of emotional painting, and I think that’s why he bought so many paintings from Redon and the Nabis,” d’Andoque de Sériège said.

Fayet’s purchase of Fontfroide slowed down his collecting, which began in 1899, the year he took over the family business and purchased 41 works from the collection of Armand Carbol, another winemaker from Béziers. His decision to buy the abbey was one that came of familiarity. The Domaine de Vedilhan, one of the Fayet’s family vineyards near Narbonne, is about 12 miles northeast of the Abbaye de Fontfroide.

“Fayet’s family knew Fontfroide for a long time before Fayet himself bought it in 1908,” d’Andoque de Sériège said. “His father, Gabriel, was a painter [who] painted the cloister of Fontfroide and the portrait of the last abbot of Fontfroide,” whom the Fayet visited in 1895 with Madeline.

But Fayet also wanted to prevent Fontfroide’s destruction. After the 1901 Law of Associations, which suppressed religious orders and seized their properties, many historical religious sites were bought so their masonry could be repurposed to make new buildings, according to d’Andoque de Sériège. (Fayet was first outbid in his quest to buy Fontfroide, which had already been sold twice, but he offered 10 percent more, triggering an auction, where he paid 49,925 francs to buy it in January 1908.)

“[Fayet] intended to turn his property into a vibrant, creative place, imbued with a fully Symbolist philosophy in which great pagan myths could enter into dialogue with Christian sensibilities in a natural setting steeped in a sacred tradition,” d’Andoque de Sériège writes in an essay he coauthored with art historian Pierre Pinchon on Redon’s decoration for Fontfroide. “Fayet’s intentions naturally appealed to Redon, who had recently been steering his work toward a pantheistic celebration of nature and a glorification of the solar myths through Apollonian, Orphic, and floral subjects.”

Redon first visited Fontfroide in October 1908, and when he arrived, he immediately noticed the statue of Diana and Apollo that Fayet had installed near the entrance. That would ultimately impact the design for La Jour. When Redon returned in March 1910 for a 10-day stay, the restoration of the library had been completed, and he had a better sense of how his commission would sit in the space.

“At that period, they discussed the project because it was easier to see room, the importance of the wall, to look at the light through the windows,” d’Andoque de Sériège said. “We guess—we are 99 percent sure—that it is during that that stay that Redon made the sketches we discovered when we removed the panels.”

While Redon made decorative panels for other sites in France, the panels at Fontfroide are the only ones that still remain in situ in their original location, according to d’Andoque de Sériège. As their titles indicate, the two larger works, Le Jour and Le Nuit, are in dialogue with each other.

“The two decorative panels are a testament to the whole career of Redon,” he said. “La Nuit is an echo of the ‘Noirs’ period of Redon, and Le Jour echoes the second period of Redon, with the theme of Apollo and Diana, but more generally with all the flowers, the bouquets, and the use of color.”

He continued, “The second reason for the importance of this decoration is it reflects finally the taste of Gustave Fayet, who first collected the ‘Noirs’ and then moved to the flowers and mythological themes of Redon. Fayet also sold [parts of his collection] in 1910, just a few months before, so it’s a period where he is reorganizing his collection around Gauguin, van Gogh, Redon, and others.”

After the Fondation Louis Vuitton exhibition, the Redon works will return to Fontfroide, as their installation was classified a few years ago by the French state as a historical monument, joining the cloister, abbey, and chapter house which were designated as such in the 19th century. Fontfroide had to receive a special authorization from the Ministry of Culture in order to loan them to the exhibition.

“It is the first and only time we will do that,” d’Andoque de Sériège said. “Very few people have heard of Fayet. The exhibition at Fondation Louis Vuittion will shed light on Fayet, but it will be visible only during five months in Paris. After the exhibition, the only thing you can see from Fayet is Fontfroide, and what he did for the restoration: the sculpture, the gardens, the tiles, the library, everything. We have to be much more precise and say much more about Fayet at Fontfroide because today when you visit Fontfroide, we say very little about Fayet, which was a mistake from my family.”