Unfortunately, Odilon Redon was not referencing the entrance of a Hot Topic when he painted The Gothic Window.

Redon’s earlier work, on the other hand, is way more aligned with the Hot Topic aesthetic. In quite the goth move, Redon worked exclusively in black and white. That is, until he became friends with artists like Paul Gauguin and Maurice Denis, who opened his eyes to the world of color in the 1890s. Some scholars also believe that his transition from creating creepy, monochromatic nightmares to images in color can also be attributed to finally gaining notoriety and, more importantly, financial stability. Money can’t buy you happiness, but it can buy you some nice pastels and oil paints.

Alongside his revelation to color, Redon also became obsessed with flowers. His body of work includes countless works that feature this very same format: a profile of a wistful-looking woman with a rainbow of flowers. Here, the flowers aren’t just nice to look at. They also stand in for the stained glass of cathedral windows, which Redon refers to in the work’s title. Both flowers and color are a bit of a theme for Mr. and Mrs. Richard C. Lockton, the patrons who gifted this artwork to the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 1970. Along with this enchanting Redon, they also gave a painting of flowers in a vase by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, as well as a scene of Venice by Claude Monet.

If you lose yourself a little bit while looking at this piece, then Redon’s done his job. The subject’s meditative state, often found in paintings by the Symbolists, radiates out and pulls the viewer into the work. The dreamlike mystery of The Gothic Window is a huge part of its appeal. The Symbolist painters were tired of the rationality and materialism that had overtaken Western European culture. Instead of reality, they sought to paint ideas and emotions. The Symbolists gravitated toward the Romantics – like Eugène Delacroix and Théodore Géricault – to develop their philosophy that art is best when it includes subjectivity and feeling. Women became the most common way to express the idea of universal emotions. Unfortunately, as the world began to see art as a way to engage politically, interest in Redon’s dreamy worlds filled with pretty flowers waned.