A dark room. A table. A pale hand lies over a folded sheet of paper in a pool of light, and above it the darkness is streaked with faint, pale lines. The French line printed under the image reads: Selon toute apparence, c'était une main de chair et de sang comme la mienne. In English, to all appearances it was a hand of flesh and blood just like my own, and the sentence is meant to make you doubt it.
The print is one of six lithographs Odilon Redon made in 1896 for La Maison hantée, The Haunted House. The portfolio was commissioned by his patron René Philipon, an occultist, as a companion to a French translation of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's ghost story The Haunted and the Haunters. Redon worked with the master printer Auguste Clot, laying lithographic crayon on its side and building up layers of marks until the blacks look velvety, and he scratched into the stone to pull out the highlights.
Redon was known for images from the border between dreaming and waking, and a ghost story was an ideal subject. His hand does not look like a monster. It looks like a hand, which is the unsettling part. The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired its impression in 1928.
Redon's print appears on our: