In the early twentieth century, the French Symbolist artist Odilon Redon painted a series of decorative panels for the Fontfroide Abbey, an eleventh-century former monastery in the South of France. The work was commissioned by the French painter Gustave Fayet and installed in the abbey’s library. When the panels were removed earlier this year for the first time, the abbey’s staff found a set of test drawings on the wall behind them.
“It was a great surprise—nobody imagined the existence of these sketches,” Alexandre d’Andoque de Sériège, Abbaye de Fontfroide’s director and Fayet’s grandson, told ARTnews. “It amuses just to imagine Redon painting them on the wall.”
While Redon may have made the drawings as a test for a fresco, “a fresco in the library would have required Redon to stay very long in Fontfroide. It’s also physically a very hard job,” d’Andoque de Sériège said. “So, I think it’s really just a painting for fun.”
Fayet, who was also a collector, met Redon in 1900 and came to own around three hundred of his works. Fayet acquired the abbey in 1908 with the intention of restoring and transforming it into a “total work of art” and commissioned his friend to produce the series of works—La Jour (Day), La Nuit (Night), and Le Silence (Silence)—each comprising three panels.
Those works were uninstalled so that they could be included in the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s exhibition “Gustave Fayet: Collector – Designer,” on view in Paris from October 9, 2026, to March 8, 2027. The show brings together more than 250 words from Fayet’s collection, including 86 by Redon, and 374 of his own works. This marks the first occasion that Redon’s panels are being shown to the general public.