Vase

A largely self-taught artist from a working-class background, Rodolphe Bresdin was an innovative fine art lithographer working at a time when lithography had come to be considered too populist and commercial. Works such as The Good Samaritan, which his student Odilon Redon described as “a strange creation,” gained Bresdin a reputation for creating a profusion of intricate and dense detail that was almost hallucinatory in its effect. The writer Joris-Karl Huysmans compared the artist to Albrecht Dürer, but with “a brain clouded by opium.”

This work was originally titled Abd-el-Kader Aiding a Christian, a reference to a famed emir of Algeria who, after being exiled for his fierce opposition to French colonialism, averted a massacre of Christians in Damascus, Syria, in 1860. Bresdin drew from a variety of sources in this image, copying most of the animals from the illustrations in a French edition of The Swiss Family Robinson.