Arthur and Hedy Hahnloser had a special passion for Redon. His work occupies a special place in their collection, as they own artworks from all his fields of activity: oil paintings, pastels, watercolours, drawings and prints.

Redon's paintings are extremely colourful. This is all the more astonishing – and at the same time understandable – when you consider that the first half of his oeuvre consisted exclusively of works in black and white. Even then, however, he was interested in enigmatic themes. The mythological, the scientific and the personal merged in his work to create a unique interplay between reality and imagination.

He was a great admirer of Leonardo da Vinci and was inspired by Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, in particular the theory that all life originated in water. He was friends with natural scientists, but was also interested in literature and illustrated works by Shakespeare and Goethe. From 1900 onwards, he created a series of colourful floral still lifes that contain both naturalistic and fantastic elements (such as the Anemones) – a dualism that also underlies his barques.

Le bateau rouge is an outstanding work with this theme, which grew into its own group of motifs around 1910. In this late work – Redon was 70 years old at the time – the enigmatic sailing boat becomes far more than a mere vessel – it seems dreamlike and unreal, no human being steers it. Rather, it is the prototype, the idea of a boat sailing across an equally imagined, invented and conceived sea, whose infinity is combined with the timelessness of these archetypes to form a metaphor of life par excellence.