What Was Hiding Behind Odilon Redon's Night

Behind the Night

In the library at Abbaye de Fontfroide, a team worked to detach La Nuit, Odilon Redon's monumental painted panel, from the wall it had hung on since 1911. As the canvas came away from the stone, the areas on either side of it, never exposed in living memory, came into view. Barthélémy d'Andoque, president of the association that runs the Fontfroide museum, later described what they saw: "Lorsqu'on a déposé 'La Nuit', on a trouvé de chaque côté des esquisses, même plus que des esquisses: un véritable travail effectué par Redon"^8,9. Roughly translated: when they took down La Nuit, they found sketches on either side, more than sketches even, a real piece of work done by Redon.

Nobody on the conservation team had gone looking for this. The panel was being removed for a routine, if delicate, reason, and what turned up on the stone behind it had sat there, unseen, for more than a century^1,2.

Fontfroide is an 11th-century former Cistercian monastery near Narbonne, in the Aude region of southern France^10,1. It fell into disuse after the religious orders were expelled from France in 1901, and in 1908 it was bought by Gustave Fayet, a wealthy collector, painter, and patron from a Languedoc winegrowing family, who set about restoring it as a private home and a working arts colony^10,8,5.

Fayet was close friends with Odilon Redon, the Symbolist painter known for his charcoal "noirs" and his dreamlike late work in pastel and oil^11,8. Around 1910, Fayet commissioned Redon to decorate the abbey's library with large-scale compositions: Le Jour (Day), La Nuit (Night), and Le Silence (Silence), each panel roughly two meters high and six and a half meters wide^8,5. Redon began the work in his Paris studio and finished it on site, and the three panels went up in the library in 1911, where they stayed for the next hundred and fifteen years^1,2,3.

That changed in 2026, when the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris organized a major exhibition on Fayet's life as a collector and creator, running from 9 October 2026 to 8 March 2027^2,5. The show wanted Redon's Fontfroide panels as its centerpiece, and getting them there meant taking them off a wall they had never left^2,8. Because the works had not moved in close to a century, the team first had to carry out what d'Andoque called a technical dépose, simply to check their condition before any journey^8,9.

That routine check is what exposed the wall. Once La Nuit came down, conservators saw silhouettes, faces, lines, and touches of color painted directly onto the stone and plaster behind it, some of them loosely echoing figures that appear in the finished panel but smaller and more colorful^2,4,5. The Fontfroide site described it plainly: figures painted by Redon directly onto the stone behind La Nuit, invisible for more than a hundred years⁷. Nobody had reason to expect them. As Alexandre d'Andoque de Sériège, the abbey's director and Fayet's grandson, put it to ARTnews: "It was a great surprise, nobody imagined the existence of these sketches. It amuses just to imagine Redon painting them on the wall"².

What the marks actually were is still an open question, and d'Andoque de Sériège has a theory that reframes the whole find. He doubts the drawings were a fresco trial in the formal sense, since painting a fresco across that wall would have meant a long stay and heavy physical labor that doesn't match Redon's documented movements². Redon visited Fontfroide for about ten days in March 1910, after the library's renovation was finished but before he had completed the panels in Paris, and d'Andoque de Sériège says he is "99 percent sure" that visit is when the sketches were made, Redon testing in his head, and apparently on the wall itself, how his coming work would sit in that room and its light^2,6. Read that way, the marks are not discarded preparatory scraps but something closer to an artist sketching for his own satisfaction in the exact space his real commission would occupy.

The drawings will not stay visible for long. Fontfroide has opened a new guided tour, "Regards contemporains," that lets visitors see the exposed stone alongside contemporary works on loan from the Fondation Louis Vuitton, but only until the panels come home^7,4. Once Le Jour, La Nuit, and Le Silence return from Paris around March 2027, they will go back up on the library wall, and the marks Redon may have left there for no one but himself will disappear behind his finished paintings again^2,4.

Timeline

1. 1908Gustave Fayet buys Fontfroide Abbey and begins restoring it as a home and arts colony.
2. March 1910Redon visits Fontfroide for about ten days; the wall drawings are generally linked to this stay.
3. 1911Le Jour, La Nuit, and Le Silence are installed in the Fontfroide library.
4. Early 2026Conservators remove the panels for the first time since installation, ahead of the Paris exhibition.
5. August 2026Reports announce the discovery of hidden Redon drawings on the wall behind the panels.
6. 9 October 2026 - 8 March 2027The Fondation Louis Vuitton exhibits the Fayet collection, including the Redon panels, in Paris.
7. 23 September 2026 - 28 February 2027Fontfroide opens the hidden drawings to the public via its "Regards contemporains" tour.

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