Madame Arthur Fontaine (Marie Escudier, born 1865), 1901. Odilon Redon. Pastel on paper. The Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ittleson Jr. Purchase Fund, 1960.
Marie Escudier Fontaine was the wife of a wealthy Parisian industrialist and art patron whose circle of friends included a number of writers, musicians, and artists, among them André Gide, Claude Debussy, and Vuillard, who twice painted her portrait. Redon executed this likeness, one of his finest and most finished pastels, when the Fontaines came to visit him and his wife at the seaside resort of Saint-Georges-de-Didonne on the southwest coast of France in September 1901.