Rodolphe Bresdin: The Incorrigible Bohemian

2016 | Art, Photography & Fashion

The book is the first published English language monograph of the distinguished French artist, Rodolphe Bresdin. It contains a rigorous re-appraisal of the artist's work,and new insights regarding his biography. Bresdin's subtle artistry was appreciated in his lifetime by talented writers such as Theodore de Banville, Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire,fellow members of the Paris bohemia. He was the mentor of Odilon Redon, who signed his work, 'pupil of Bresdin'. Redon was a lifelong advocate of the imaginative genius of his teacher. Bresdin's life story is stranger and even more compelling than those of Gauguin and van Gogh: penniless throughout his life, a country boy uneasy in the Paris boheme, an epic journey to Southern France, then later, at the age of fifty, with a wife and six children he disastrously voyaged to Canada. They were rescued by Hugo and the bohemians, followed, however,by marital break-up and his death in a garret room.His work has sometimes been judged on his two most famous pictures, 'The Good Samaritan' and 'The Comedy of Death', however all Bresdin's oeuvre is fired by a fine sensitivity,sagaciously depicting the natural world in a manner ranging from the delightfully sinister to a rampant elemental ferocity.

Bresdin's work is held in many of the major museums allover the world including the Musee d'Orsay, Metropolitan Museum of Art, MOMA (NY), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Rijk Musem and the Art Institute Chicago.

Trevor Dance (Author)