Odilon Redon painted The Cyclops around 1914. The one-eyed giant Polyphemus rises from behind a hill of flowers, his single eye fixed on the small sleeping figure of the nymph Galatea below him. In Redon's hands the Greek monster is not terrifying but tender and melancholy, a huge shy head peering over the landscape at a beauty he cannot have. The whole surface glows with the saturated, dreamlike colour of Redon's late work.

For most of his career Redon worked in charcoal and lithograph, in a private world of noirs peopled by spiders, severed heads, and floating eyes. In his last years he turned to colour and to mythological subjects like this one. A central figure of Symbolism, he made dream and the inner life the proper subject of art. The painting belongs to the Kroller-Muller Museum.