Fear

Fear — Odilon Redon. 1865.

Medium: Etching on cream laid paper. Dimensions: 110 × 200 mm (image) 140 × 222 mm (plate); 270 × 358 mm (sheet).

Collection record: Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Museum connection according to this source; current display unverified.

Odilon Redon’s fantastically dark sensibility is in full evidence in Fear. A rider protecting a child in his arms gallops past desolate plunging ravines, driven by an unseen threat. Redon’s dramatic etching may refer to the Elfking (Der Erlkönig), a tragic 1782 poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In that work, a father tries to reassure his anxious, dangerously ill son that the hostile elements that beset them are not elves trying to spirit him away. Though the child dies, the poem remains open to interpretation. Indeed, Redon’s forbidding landscape strongly suggests the presence of supernatural forces only the doomed son could sense.

Description: © Art Institute of Chicago, original record, CC BY 4.0. HTML formatting removed; wording retained. Other artwork metadata: CC0.

Source: official collection record. Metadata selected and normalized by Artline from the source export, accessed 10 September 2026; no museum endorsement. Reproduction rights are separate.