Few artworks capture loneliness and existential melancholy quite as tenderly as Odilon Redon’s The Crying Spider.
Looking at this drawing, you get a real sense of how detached the subconscious can be from reality, creating a world that feels both familiar and entirely foreign.
First created around 1881, this charcoal drawing is one of Redon’s haunting noirs, a series of black-and-white works that explore the murky intersection of dream and reality.
Dreams, myths and psychology
To understand The Crying Spider, it helps to first understand the Symbolist art movement. Emerging in the late 19th century, Symbolism rejected realism and naturalism, favouring inner emotions, dreams, myths, and psychological states. Artists like Redon weren’t interested in painting what they could see, they wanted to make visible what is invisible.
When breaking down different elements of this drawing, it’s important to get a feel for what Redon’s life and personal experiences were like, as they deeply shaped the dreamlike, often unsettling worlds he created on paper.
He was deliberately moving away from traditional academic painting to something more internal, poetic, and psychological.
In the early 1880s, Redon was still relatively unknown but gaining confidence in his voice as an artist.
The crying spider is seen as a projection of suppressed human emotion or the subconscious. When we look deeply at the significance of the spider personified in our subconscious, a mirror of our hidden anxieties, tangled emotions, and unspoken desires. The truth may be that this was a real manifestation of Redon’s life.
Another thing we can explore is how the spider’s body with a human head (possibly a child’s) invites sympathy and a quiet sense of connection with the creature’s sorrow.
There’s an uncanny sense of perspective, as if the spider is emerging from a shadowed cave, or perhaps we’re gazing at the creature’s underbelly, where fine strands of hair catch the light.
Its expression is turned upward rather than meeting the viewer’s gaze, suggesting a quiet withdrawal, as though lost in its own sorrow.
The rough, gritty texture of the charcoal intensifies the moody atmosphere, wrapping the entire scene in a feeling of unease and emotional weight.
Spiders as Mirrors of Human Emotion
Redon had a knack for turning creatures that normally make us squirm into emotional mirrors.
Critics point out that in The Crying Spider, the tiny tears and mournful posture create a mix of revulsion and empathy. We shudder, yes, but we also feel a strange sympathy. That tension, that odd emotional cocktail, is precisely what makes Redon’s work resonate: he turns the uncanny into something profoundly human.
A closer look at this artwork reveals that Redon’s goal was not to provoke disgust, but to evoke sympathy, highlighting the human-like emotions and inner life of the insect. Scholars note that Redon often used animals and fantastical creatures to explore subconscious feelings and universal human experiences.
For more context on the Symbolist aim of expressing inner emotional states rather than literal reality, see this overview of the Symbolist movement
Beyond Spider and Human
One of the most striking features of The Crying Spider is the fusion of a spider’s body with a human face.
In Symbolist art, such hybrids often reflect the complexity of human psychology.
The second symbol to focus on is the tears. The tears streaming from the spider’s eyes are the most human feature in the drawing. Against the body of an insect a creature many of us instinctively fear.
These tears make the figure unexpectedly poignant. They completely transform the nature of the insect from aggressive to passive, suggesting a universal emotional experience, even if we try to hide it.
As our eyes move across the artwork, we begin to notice the spider’s elusive body. Spiders have long carried symbolic meaning and are known for weaving intricate webs, they are often associated with creation, patience, and the interconnectedness of life. Redon may be drawing on these deeper meanings: the spider’s form can be read as a metaphor for the fragile, tangled structure of human experience, where emotions, memories, and fate quietly weave together beneath the surface.
One striking detail is how the spider’s body half-appears from a circular shape in the composition. Circles often represent wholeness, cycles, and continuity. By having the spider partially emerge, Redon may be suggesting that emotions and subconscious impulses are part of a larger web of life, continuously forming and reforming.
Why is Redon so important
When Redon drew The Crying Spider in 1881, he was well into a creative phase that art historians now call his “noirs”. This period was dominated by dark charcoal drawings filled with dreamlike, mysterious, and often eerie figures.
The last thing to consider when studying The Crying Spider is the absence of background.
In many of Redon’s noir drawings, there’s little to no elaborated background, and we find the figure floats in a void. That lack of “real world” context reinforces Symbolism’s central aim: the work isn’t about where it is, it’s about what it feels like.
The spider isn’t situated in a garden or a web; instead, it exists in a psychological space that acts as a emotional vacuum to project your own internal experience onto it.
Odilon Redon’s Crying Spider remains unsettling not because it shows a monster, but because it reveals something recognisably human. Through tears, hybrid form, and Symbolist ambiguity, the drawing transforms an insect into a mirror for inner life, fragile, emotional, and strangely familiar. What do you see when you meet its gaze?
Where can you find Redon’s paintings?
Odilon Redon’s art has been collected by some of the world’s most respected galleries, giving audiences across continents the chance to experience his range, from haunting charcoal noirs to vivid pastels and oils.
In France, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris holds a significant selection of his works, including both early drawings and later pieces, reflecting his importance in 19th-century art history.
In the United States, institutions such as the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., house a broad array of Redon’s paintings and pastels, offering a window into his evolving style. The Cleveland Museum of Art is known for one of the most substantial holdings of his work outside France, with key pieces in its collection that span his career.
Beyond these, museums such as the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid include examples of some of his most underated dark symbolist compositions, while other European collections, like the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands, feature major works such as The Cyclops, showing how widely his visionary art is appreciated today
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