Centaur Reading

Redon was attracted to hybrid creatures such as centaurs, mythical beasts with a horse's body and a man's torso. Here, he depicts the centaur Chiron, tutor of Aesculapius and Achilles, standing in a meadow with a large tome open before him. Redon used erasing throughout the sheet to introduce highlights and to create the delicate pale flowers at the centaur's feet. While we see the creature's body and torso in three-quarters-view, his face is turned away from us and remains obscured. Unlike most centaurs whose animal nature causes them to behave in savage ways, Chiron was an exception, hailed for his wisdom and learning. This atypical example of the learned beast and the unexpected depiction of a centaur with a book must have appealed to Redon's sense of the unlikely. As Douglas Druick and Peter Zegers have shown, Redon had long been compelled by two poems about Chiron, Maurice de Guérin's "Le Centaure" (1835) and Leconte de Lisle's poem "Khiron" (1852), romantic verses evoking the truth and beauty their author imagined was epitomized by ancient Greece.