Rudolphe bresdin (1822 - 1885)
- Ben Samuel
- May 14
- 4 min read
Draughtsman and Engraver
"His powers lay in imagination alone. He conceived nothing in advance. He improvised with joy, or tenaciously completed the tangle of this tiny, imperceptible vegetation that you see there, in these forests that he dreamed of. He adored nature. He spoke of it gently, with tenderness, in a voice that suddenly became convincing and serious, and which contrasted with the tone of his conversation, usually whimsical and playful. 'My drawings are true, whatever people say,' he often affirmed." - Odilon Redon (1840-1916)
An itinerant and solitary person, Rudolphe Bresdin was nonetheless a much admired and influential figure. The son of a tanner, Bresdin left home at an early age, it is said due to a family argument, and headed to Paris. He was poor most of his life and led what some have called a Bohemian lifestyle. Bresdin saw little success through his art and made little income from it. He travelled through France living and sleeping in the open air, moving from Paris to Toulouse, where he occupied, in his own words, "a mud hut in a market garden, not far from the Pont des Demoiselles". It was whilst living near Bordeaux in 1863, that Bresdin met and mentored Odilon Redon who became a close friend. Bresdin's influence on his pupil is obvious. He travelled with his family to America and to Canada, hoping to settle there and perhaps to live out an adventurous fantasy in the mould of his favourite novel The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 by James Fenimore Cooper. Discouraged by a lack of work however, he returned to Paris in the spring of 1877.
In his later years he became increasingly isolated from his family and friends and died in poverty aged 63.
His work was greatly admired by Charles Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Robert de Montesquiou and André Breton and friend and pupil Odilon Redon.
From Against Nature (1884) by Joris-Karl Huysmans
"In the adjoining room, the vestibule, a larger apartment panelled with cedar wood the colour of a cigar box, were ranged in rows other engravings and drawings equally extraordinary. Bresdin's 'Comedy of Death' (above) was one, where an impossible landscape bristling with trees, coppices and thickets taking the shape of demons and phantoms, swarming with birds having rat's heads and tails of vegetables, from a soil littered with human bones, vertebrae, ribs and skulls, spring willows, knotted and gnarled, surmounted by skeletons tossing their arms in unison and chanting a hymn of victory, while a Christ flies away to a sky dappled with little clouds; a hermit sits pondering, his head between his hands, in the recesses of a grotto; a beggar dies, worn out with privations, exhausted with hunger, stretched on his back, his feet extended towards a stagnant pool." Another was 'the Good Samaritan' (below) by the same artist, an immense pen and ink drawing lithographed, a wild entanglement of palms, service trees, oaks, growing all together in defiance of seasons and climates, an outburst of virgin forest, crammed with apes, owls and screech owls, cumbered with old stumps shapeless as roots of coral, a magic wood, pierced by a clearing dimly revealing far away, beyond a camel and the group of the Samaritan and the men who fell by the wayside, a river and behind it again a fairy-like city climbing to the horizon line, rising to meet a strange-looking sky, dotted with birds, woolly with rolling clouds, swelling as it were, with bales of vapour. You would have thought it the work of an early Italian master or a half-developed Albert Dürer, composed under the influence of opium."
"I don't know how yet, but I will do everything I can to live, I will try to sell some proofs of this good Samaritan so well named and who has already saved me so many times. I have only very few left, but very good and very beautiful" - Rodolphe Bresdin, Letter to Alcide Dusolier, March 14, 1883
"My father would spend hours examining from below the leaves, the branches, the twigs, the very texture, the tassels and laces of a bush . He would fly into a sudden rage and exclaim “Even the greatest artist is incapable of rendering this! It is beyond us... He would spend hours in our garden, studying the work of spiders weaving their web" - Julie Rodolphine Bresdin (Daughter)
"I do not seek to explain this art to you, because what is beautiful cannot be explained... Understand its spirit, see, on these tiny surfaces, the expression of an ingenuous good nature, of naivety, something of a distant, humble, confused, saddened humanity." - Odilon Redon (1840-1916)
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