Fear (La Peur)

Redon’s image was likely inspired by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s poem Der Erlkönig (1782), in which a father carries his young boy home on horseback. Despite the child’s insistence that a supernatural being, the Elfking, is attacking him, the father reassures him that everything is all right, only to discover upon reaching home that the boy has died in his arms. Whether or not the correlation of Redon’s image with Goethe’s poem is direct, the angular portrayal of the horse and rider speeding through an inhospitable, desolate landscape conveys the emotional intensity of the subject and imparts a sense of foreboding independent of any potential textual source.