Signed lower left.

Provenance: gift of the artist to the doctor of the Redon family, France;
Private collection, Italy.

The subject of the sphinx, one of the archetypes most loved by Symbolist art and itself an exemplification of the timeless enigma, has been addressed several times by Odilon Redon especially in the 1880s, as can be seen for example in the charcoal datable to 1883 from the Art Institute of Chicago collection (1950.1415). In the case of the work presented here, the depiction of the sphinx according to the canons of classical Egyptian art, allows us to establish a suggestive connection with the famous lithograph of 1889, "The sphinx and the chimera", part of the serie conceived for the Gustave Flaubert's work "The temptations of St. Anthony": "... mon regard que rien ne peut dévier, demeure tendu à travers les choses sur un horizon inaccessible.".