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Your galleryPandora
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Compare Pandora’s pale outline with the more vivid flowers near her feet. Does the figure seem to stand apart from the garden or to merge with it?
Painted around 1914, this image draws on the Greek myth of Pandora, whose opened container released evils into the world. Redon places the figure among flowers and drifting patches of color rather than illustrating a dramatic release. The myth gives an apparently peaceful garden an unsettled meaning, without fixing the scene to one moment in the story.
Oil on canvas · 56 1/2 x 24 1/2 in. (143.5 x 62.2 cm · The Metropolitan Museum of Art · Symbolism
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Details and source
- Museum title
- Pandora
- Artist
- Odilon Redon (French, Bordeaux 1840–1916 Paris)
- Date
- ca. 1914
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 56 1/2 x 24 1/2 in. (143.5 x 62.2 cm)
- Credit line
- Bequest of Alexander M. Bing, 1959
- Image license
- CC0 1.0 · Public domain
- Museum record
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Galler’s rooms and hanging scale are imagined. The image is the museum’s original digital reproduction.