Month: January 2012

The Sick Child by Edvard Munch

The Sick Child by Edvard Munch (1907) The Tate, London

If I was to mention the name Edvard Munch to most people they would automatically think of his famous painting entitled The Scream and although I will look at that masterpiece in a future blog, today I want to concentrate on his very poignant painting entitled Det syke barn (The Sick Child) which he completed in 1886.  The version you see above is one he completed twenty years after he painted the original and is now to be found in the Tate Gallery, London.  However I look more closely at the painting, I would like to delve into the early life of Munch and by so doing, it may give one an insight into the man and his paintings.

Edvard Munch was born on December 12th, 1863, on a farm, in the village of Ådalsbruk in Løten, Norway.  His father, Christian Munch, the son of a clergyman, was a military doctor, who in 1861 had married Laura Catherine Bjølstad, a woman half his age.  The couple had two sons, Peter Andreas and Edvard and three daughters, Johanne Sophie, Laura Catherine and Inger Marie.     In 1864, when Edvard was just one year old, the family moved to Kristiania (now known as Oslo) as his father had been offered the post of medical officer at the Akershus Fortress.  In 1868, when Edvard was still not five years of age, his mother died of tuberculosis.  Following her death the five children were brought up by their father and their aunt Karen.  Edvard proved to be a sickly child, especially during the cold harsh Norwegian winters.   He suffered from chronic asthmatic bronchitis and had several serious attacks of rheumatic fever and would often have to be kept off school and it was during these times when he was at home confined to his bed that Edvard developed a love of sketching.  Whilst at home his father would tutor him in history and literature.  There can be no doubt as to Christian Munch’s devotion to his children but there was a down-side to this dedication and attentiveness.  Christian Munch was an extremely religious man.  He was a orthodox Christian and a great believer and follower of pietism.  The Pietist movement combined the Lutheranism of the time with the Calvinism emphasis on individual piety and living a vigorous Christian life.  Edvard always remembered his father’s strict religious beliefs and in Sue Prideaux’s 2005 book on Munch entitled Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream, she quotes Munch:

“…My father was temperamentally nervous and obsessively religious—to the point of psychoneurosis. From him I inherited the seeds of madness. The angels of fear, sorrow, and death stood by my side since the day I was born…”

Edvard Munch, like his siblings had to suffer their father’s religious fanaticism and he would often tell them when they were naughty that their mother was looking down upon them and weeping with sadness at their behaviour.  Combine his father’s behaviour with his own illnesses as a child and it is no wonder that young Edvard and some of his siblings experienced nightmares and death-like hallucinations.  Death was never far away from Edvard.  His favourite sister, Johanne Sophie, died of tuberculosis in 1877 when he was fourteen years old.  One of his younger sisters was diagnosed with a mental illness at an early age and Edvard’s brother Andreas who was the only one of the children to marry, died a few months after his wedding.  All this affected Edvard and in Arne Eggum’s 1984 biography of the artist, he quotes Munch as saying:

“…I inherited two of mankind’s most frightful enemies—the heritage of consumption and insanity…”

To supplement his meagre army pay, Christian Munch tried to set up in private practice but this failed and he and his children suffered a poverty-stricken lifestyle which made it necessary to move from home to home in ever worsening conditions.  Many of Edvard Munch’s early drawings and watercolours were of the interiors of their various homes.    In 1879 he followed his father’s wishes by entering the Technical College to become an engineer. However the illnesses Munch had suffered during his childhood continued and, as was the case with his time at school, he had frequent absences from the college due to his ailments.  He fell so far behind in his studies that in the autumn of 1880 he left the college, deciding engineering was not for him. There was an entry in his diary of November 7th 1880:

‘….My decision is now namely to be a painter…”

In the following year he enrolled at the Royal School of Art and Design where he stayed for one year.  He and a few of his fellow art students then set up and rented a studio in a building which housed other painters.  One of these painters was the Norwegian artist, Christian Krohg, who offered to tutor these young aspiring painters.  Krohg was a leading figure in the changeover from romanticism to naturalism, characterized by Norwegian art in this period.   Edvard Munch exhibited his first painting at the end of 1883 at the Industry and Art Exhibition in Oslo.

In 1885 Munch received money to study for three weeks in Paris and the following year he began to work on today’s featured painting, The Sick Child.

My featured painting today by Munch was completed in 1886 when he was just twenty-three years of age and remains one of his most important works.  Munch himself describe this work as “a breakthrough in my art”  Munch created numerous versions of the painting and as I said at the beginning, the painting you see before you today is the fourth version, which he painted in 1907, and which is currently being exhibited at the Tate Gallery, London.   In the painting, the central character is that of a stricken young girl propped up in bed by a thick white pillow and covered by a heavy blanket.  She is dying of tuberculosis.  Her red hair is tousled and uncombed.  This is not just the death of any girl.  This is the death of Edvard Munch’s elder sister, Johanne Sophie, who was dying slowly, in fever, often hallucinating, and begging for someone to rescue her from the jaws of death. Edvard was both distressed and terrified by his own helplessness. His father even with his medical knowledge could not do anything to save his daughter. In the eyes of young Edvard’s both God and his father were both guilty of letting Sophie die.  From this time on, death became a constant companion in the young artist’s life and there can be no doubt that this early traumatic childhood experience influenced all of Munch’s art.   Munch later, he said of this feeling:

“…Sickness, insanity and death were the angels that surrounded my cradle and they have followed me throughout my life…”

This work of art is all about the fragility of life.  As she lies back on the pillow the young girl seems to be focusing on the black drape at the right of the painting.  Maybe Munch wanted to have us interpret this as her staring at death itself.  Next to the bed of the dying girl we see a distraught female, clutching one of her hands in theirs, offering what little comfort she can at this heartrending time.  Look how the supportive friend, who holds the hand of her dying friend, is affected by the situation. Her head is bowed and her eyes are averted from the face of the dying child.   She cannot bear to witness the fear and suffering in the child’s eyes.

I have often said in earlier blogs that I wondered what was going through the artist’s mind when he or she was painting a certain picture.  In this case we can almost feel the pain and the sadness of the artist as he portrayed his dying sister.  Anybody who has suffered the loss of a family member must know what was going through Munch’s mind as he had to recall such a harrowing scene.

There is a history to this version of the painting.  It was bought by the city of Dresden in 1928, where it was displayed in the city art gallery.  Ten years later the Nazis regime declared that the art of Edvard Munch was ‘degenerate’ and, in November 1938, all his works in German public collections were collected in Berlin for sale by auction. Today’s featured painting and many others by Munch were rescued by a Norwegian art dealer, Harald Holst Halvorsen, who returned them safely to Oslo. The painting was then acquired by Thomas Olsen in 1939, who donated it to the Tate.

Were the critics as moved by this poignant painting when it was exhibited at the Autumn Exhibition in Kristiana in 1886?    Alas the painting shocked the critics and the public alike and a storm of indignation and protest broke out.   It is very important to try and understand the people’s hostile reaction;   they were simply not accustomed to see this kind of painting. For them, art was still synonymous with beauty, harmony, good shape, and for them the sight of suffering, ugliness and pain in a painting was just not acceptable.  Edvard Munch however was not put off by the condemnation and criticism.  He came back to the painting time and time again over the following twenty years, re-painting it but never once toning down the sadness and the emotion which, I am sure you agree, makes it a beautiful and moving work of art.  Death, illness and mental anguish were subjects that would from then on continue to figure significantly in Edvard Munch’s future paintings.

On the Brink by Alfred Elmore

On the Brink by Alfred Elmore (1865)

Today I am featuring a work of narrative art.  Narrative art is one that tells a story and has been very popular in Western art.  It often depicts stories from the Bible, mythological tales and legends and were often pictorial recordings of great moments in history.  In the seventeenth century we began to see such narrative works in the paintings of subjects from everyday life, which were known as genre paintings.  They originated in the main in Holland with scenes of peasant life and drinking scenes in taverns.  In England in the sixteenth century the artist William Hogarth invented the Modern Moral Subject paintings which brilliantly brought to our attention and lampooned the manners and morals in his day.  I featured a set of these paintings in My Daily Art Display (May 4th to May 9th 2011).  Before I talk about today’s painting, I will briefly tell you a little about the life of Alfred Elmore.  In the meantime, I want you to look at the painting and see if you can surmise what is going on and why the artist chose the title of On the Brink.

Today featured work is a Victorian narrative painting by English painter of Irish birth, Alfred Elmore.  Elmore was a Victorian history and genre painter, who was born in Cork in Southern Ireland.  His father, John Richard Elmore was a retired surgeon from the British Army.   His family moved to London and Alfred attended the Royal Academy Schools in 1832.  Whilst at the Academy he briefly associated with a group of fellow art students who had just formed a sketching society which they called The Clique.  It was described as the first group of British artists to combine for greater strength and to announce that the great backward-looking tradition of the Academy was not relevant to the requirements of contemporary art.

In the late 1830’s Elmore studied at French atelier and then from 1840 to 1844 travelled extensively through Europe visiting Munich Venice, Bologna, and Florence and spent two years in Rome.  In 1844 he exhibited his work entitled Rienzi in the Forum at the Royal Academy and this led to him becoming an Associate of the Royal Academy (ARA) the following year.  He became a Royal Academician in 1857.  Elmore painted a number of literary subjects, especially depicting scenes from the plays of Shakespeare but many of his later works were historical narrative works, some of which were wholly anti-Catholic in spirit.  Elmore’s reputation was at its height in the 1850’s but he suffered a lapse into comparative obscurity during the latter portion of his life.  He died of cancer in 1881, aged sixty-five.

And so I return to today’s painting entitled On the Brink which Alfred Elmore painted in 1865 and was probably his best known work.  It is termed a moral genre painting which may give you a clue to what is happening in the painted scene.  What do you make of the title of the painting?  Have you any idea why Elmore would give the work such a name?  I suppose to discover the answers to these questions one has to first identify what we are looking at.  We are standing outside a house and looking through an open window into a room which is the venue for some sort of gaming.  A man leans out of the window and is talking to an unhappy-looking woman who is seated outside.  That is the scene and the man and the woman are the main characters.

This painting, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1865, clearly embellishes the concerns Victorian people had about gambling, especially when it involved young women. The artist has created a striking sense of depth within the painting. There is a great contrast in the colours used for the interior and the exterior.   In the foreground we have the outside tranquillity and paleness of the moonlight which contrasts with the dazzling red and gold gaudiness of the hustle and bustle going on inside the room.   Look at the garish colours of the gaming room.  The red wallpaper is lit by a chandelier and candles, which are reflected in gilt mirrors around the walls. A throng of people lean over a gaming table, totally absorbed in the action, which contrasts with the sorrowful state of the woman in the foreground. If we look to the left background we can see a curtained-archway which leads to another well-lit gaming room full of people.  We are almost certain we know the setting for this painting for there is a one word inscription, Homburg, on the reverse of the canvas.  In 1842, the German town of Bad Homburg had a casino and spa and had attracted a wealthy and cosmopolitan clientele to its gaming tables, of which many were British.

The woman with a decision to make.

The young woman, we see before us, sits unhappily outside in the darkness of the evening. Her figure is illuminated by the white light coming from the moon. We can only see one side of her face which is deathly white whilst the other side is hidden in the darkness of the night.  Her clothes are of a rich quality and the height of fashion.  Our first clue as to what the painting is all about is the empty purse which dangles from her right hand and a torn gaming card which lies discarded at her feet. From these clues we now know why she is in such a state – she has lost all her money at the gaming tables which we can see through the open window behind her.

The seducer

Still we haven’t reconciled the title of the painting but if we look at the shadowy figure of a man leaning out of the window talking to her all will be resolved.  His figure, apart from his hands, is neither illuminated by the light from the room nor the moonlight.  The way the young man is depicted, almost devil-like, adds a certain air of foreboding and menace and we feel that he is not a good companion for this lady.  It is interesting to see how the artist compares this mismatch with the couple in the middle ground.  They are standing in the room directly behind the shadowy figure and face each other in a loving stance.

The title of the painting can be understood a little better if we look at the flowers which are next to the woman.  There are two types of flower.  One is a white lily which symbolises purity whilst the other is the purple passion flower.  In the Punch magazine in the May of the year the painting was exhibited, an anonymous poet had written, about the scene and what we were looking at:

E’s [for] Mr. Elmore. She’s tempted to sin;
She’s fair. Will the lily or the passion flower win?

According to the poet’s understanding of the painting, it was all about the choice faced by the unfortunate young female who had just gambled away all her money and was now being propositioned by an unseemly man.   The question she is on the brink of answering is, should she retain her virtue and face the consequences of her new found poverty, or does she earn the money she needs to repay her debts by submitting to the proposition of the young man who is offering money for her body.  As we look at her she is “on the brink” of making her decision.  So we now know that the title of the painting derives from the situation in which a young woman s ‘on the brink’ of responding to the blandishments of a seducer, who is depicted as a Satan-like figure, luridly bathed in red light, and whispering corrupting thoughts in her ear.

There were a number of Victorian paintings which depicted “fallen women” and I will look at another in a few days time.  This one by Elmore, which he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1865, was to greatly enhance his reputation as a Victorian artist.

The painting is presently housed in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

The Rain It Raineth Every Day by Norman Garstin

The Rain It Raineth Every Day by Norman Garstin (1889)

Most of you, who have read my blogs, may know by now that I took early retirement and am now running a small Bed & Breakfast establishment in a Welsh coastal town.  I pride myself in trying to give my guests the best stay they could ask for and each morning cook them the best breakfast possible and I am pleased to say my small establishment has received top ratings on a certain website.  The people that stay with my wife and I are from all over the world, some coming from hot climates.  Sadly, the only thing I cannot guarantee my visitors is the weather.  My breakfast room is in the conservatory and when the heavens open, I try and convince my diners that the sound of rain on the conservatory roof is actually worse than the conditions outside.  I am not sure whether I am believed!  I actually feel guilty about the weather they have to sometimes endure!  So why do I mention this?  It is certainly not an advert for my B&B but merely a lead in to today’s featured painting which highlights the worst of the British weather.  My Daily Art Display’s featured painting today is entitled The Rain it Raineth Every Day and it was completed by the Irish artist and writer Norman Garstin in 1889.

Norman Garstin was born in Cahirconlish, in County Limerick, Southern Ireland in 1847.  His mother was Irish and his father was of Anglo-Irish descent and he was their only child.  He displayed no early interest in art and on leaving school attended the Engineering College of Cork and it was during that time when he was studying to become an engineer and draughtsman that it became apparent that he had a great aptitude for drawing.  Because of this palpable talent for drawing, he moved to London to study architecture.  It was whilst living in the capital that he heard and read about the money that was to be made in the South African diamond fields.  The lure of a possible fortune to be made was too much for him to ignore and so in 1872 he journeyed to South Africa and the diamond field centre, Kimberley, in order to make his fortune.  He remained there for four years and for some time shared a tent with Cecil Rhodes, the English-born South African who was to become the founder of the diamond company De Beers and the founder of the state of Rhodesia, which was named after him.

Garstin did not make his fortune digging for diamonds and after four years he moved to Cape Town where with Frederick York St Leger, an Anglican clergyman and a fellow Limerick man he helped to edit the Cape Times newspaper.    He returned to Ireland but after a bad riding accident, in which he lost the sight of his right eye, Garstin made another career change and turned his attention to art.    He travelled to Antwerp in 1878 where he studied at the Koninklijke Academie, which had been founded two hundred years earlier by David Teniers the Younger.  It was here that Garstin studied under the Belgian painter, Charles Verlat.  From Antwerp he went to live in Paris in 1871, where he remained for three years studying at the studio of Carolus-Duran, the French painter and art teacher.  Whilst in Paris he made many friends in the artistic community, two of whom, Degas and Manet, were artists he looked upon as the greatest painters of their time.  After Paris, and influenced by the French naturalist painter, Garstin Jules Bastien-Lepage, Garstin travelled to Britanny to paint, which was a favoured place for naturalist painters at that time.   Later he travelled around the south of France, Spain, and Tangiers.  In 1885 he was in Italy and in Venice and it was during his European travels that he made friends with many artists who would later form part of the artist colony at Newlyn, which was to be his next port of call.

Garstin moved to Cornwall in 1886 and became one of the early members of the Newlyn School, an art colony situated in and around the small Cornish fishing village of Newlyn, which was situated close to the town of Penzance.  This newly found artist community was similar in nature to the Barbizon School on the outskirts of Paris, near the Fontainebleau Forest, which was established in the 1830’s.  In both cases the lure to these places was the fantastic natural light and the opportunity to paint outside, en plein air.  This opportunity to paint outside instead of in a studio was helped with the innovation of tubes of paint and the invention of the box easel with its built-in paint box, which made it much easier for artists to trek around the undulating countryside.  For Garstin, the fishing port of Newlyn had other things going for it as well.  It was cheap to live there and artists’ models were easy to come by and inexpensive.  The Newlyn School artists found the everyday life in the harbour and the nearby villages were ideal subjects for their paintings and their works often brought home the harsh conditions experienced by the fishing fraternity and the hazards and tragedies which were often associated with that profession.

It was also in 1886 that Garstin married.  The couple had two sons, one of whom was killed in the war and the other went on to be a respected writer.  In 1894, his wife, who was also a painter, gave birth to their daughter Alethea.  Garstin dedicated much time in teaching art to his daughter and she blossomed under his tutelage.  She was the youngest woman to have a painting accepted by the Royal Academy and went on to become a great en plein air artist in her own right and was once called “England’s leading Impressionist”.

Norman Garstin stayed in Newlyn for four years before moving to Wellington Terrace, Penzance in 1890.  He was not a prolific artist and so was not always able to support himself financially from the sale of his paintings.  For that reason he had to supplement his income by writing, teaching and giving lectures.  From 1899 onwards he would organize artist summer schools and led summer trips to the Continent for his students.  Garstin died in Penzance in 1926, shortly before his seventy-ninth birthday.

Today’s featured work by Garstin The Rain it Raineth Every Day derives its title from two of Shakespeare’s plays, Twelfth Night and King Lear.  In Act V, Scene I of Twelfth Night there is a soliloquy by the clown as he sings a song, the last line of each verse ends with the title of today’s painting:

When that I was a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came to man’s estate,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
‘Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate,
For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came, alas! to wive,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
By swaggering could I never thrive,
For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came unto my beds,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
With toss-pots still had drunken heads,
For the rain it raineth every day.

A great while ago the world begun,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
But that’s all one, our play is done,
And we’ll strive to please you every day.

The painting depicts the promenade between Newlyn and Penzance on a windswept and rainy day, just like it is now, as I look out my window.  It was painted in 1899 and Garstin, with his hopes high, submitted it to the Royal Academy for inclusion in that year’s exhibition but the jury rejected it.  It is such a realistic painting that one can almost feel the sea spay on one’s face as one gazes at the painting.  The way Garstin has painted the scene is thought to have been influenced by works of Whistler, one of Garstin’s favourite painters.  On the left we see the Queens Hotel and further to the right we can just make out the parish church which lies behind a row of terraced houses.

The painting presently hangs in the Penlee House Gallery and Museum in Penzance.  Of all Garstin’s works, this is the one he is remembered for.

So has the setting changed much since the time of Garstin?  I have to admit I have never been to Penzance but my thanks to Jane on whose website entitled Fleur Fisher in her World, I found this picture of the present day promenade

(http://fleurfisher.wordpress.com/2009/12/27/norman-garstin-irishman-and-newlyn-artist-by-richard-pryke/

The promenade at Penzance today

Harvest at La Crau with Montmajour in the Background by Vincent van Gogh

Harvest at La Crau with Montmajour in the Background (1888)

For all of us in the northern hemisphere we are in the midst of winter.  The days are short, the skies are grey and the rain is plentiful.  It is truly a depressing time of the year and one knows only too well that there is nothing more likely to lift one’s spirits than the presence of blue skies, coupled with long hours of sunshine and feeling the warmth of the sun on one’s back.  So what has all this to do with My Daily Art Display’s featured painting and the famous artist who painted it?  Well, just maybe Vincent felt the same as he looked out the window of his Parisian apartment in February 1888.  Today my featured artist is Vincent Willem van Gogh and my featured painting is entitled Harvest at La Crau with Montmajour in the Background which he completed this work in 1888 and can now be found in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Van Gogh had come to Paris from Antwerp in March 1886 to live with his brother Théo, who was the manager at the Goupil Gallery in the Boulevard Montmartre.  He studied for a time at the Atelier Cormon under the tutelage of Femand Cormon, the French painter and art teacher.  Whilst in Paris, Van Gogh met up with many of the Impressionists, such as Camille Pissarro, Emile Bernard and Claude Monet and became firm friends with Paul Gaugin who only arrived in the French capital in late 1887.  Van Gogh also witnessed the infancy of Neo-Impressionism and the works of the Neo-Impressionists Signac and Seurat.  Van Gogh quickly abandoned the dark colors he had used to create his earlier paintings and began to he embrace the brighter more vibrant colors and the techniques of the Impressionists.   Life in the French capital for van Gogh with his painting during the day and his socialising with his fellow artists at night soon began to affect his health and after almost two years he began to tire of the cliquish Parisian art scene.   Whether it was for this reason or for health reasons or even the simple desire to leave the drab and cold capital city we will probably never be sure but there was no doubt that he hankered for the warmer sunny climate and the vibrant colours of the southern countryside.,  Van Gogh decided to move south to Arles and take advantage of the special Provencal climate  with its many uninterrupted hours of sunlight and by doing so also absorb the beauty of the French countryside.  It was his fervent hope that he could persuade some of his newly found artist friends to join him there and together they could set up a school of art,  maybe even an artists’ colony and together he believed they could resurrect the purity of the arts.  This was to be van Gogh’s  Studio of the South.  He left Paris in February 1888, a month before his thirty-fifth birthday, and headed south for Provence.

It was during his sojourn in Provence that he painted today’s featured painting Harvest at La Crau with Montmajour in the Background.  Van Gogh loved this region of Provence with the rocky outcrop of Montmajour and the Montmajour abbey.  This was thought to be one of the happiest times of his troubled life.   For a short period he seemed very content with his way of life.  He made many pen and ink sketches of the Benedictine abbey at Montmajour and the spectacular views from it of the surrounding area.   Van Gogh spent much time producing sketches with his reed pen and rather less time painting.  The reasons for this were probably two-fold.  Painting and the acquiring of paints was quite costly and it was almost impossible to paint when the Mistral wind was at full strength.   In a letter which he wrote to his brother Théo in July 1888, he described the pleasure he derived from this area, despite the problem with mosquitos and the strong cold northerly Mistral wind which made his canvases shake on the easel andmade en plein air painting almost impossible.  He wrote:

“….But now I’ve been to Montmajour 50 times to see that view over the plain, if a view can make one forget such small displeasures, then it must have something…”

In this painting, the pride of place does not go to the abbey which can be seen in the background.   The painting is all about the yellow and green patchwork quilt fields of La Crau which lay between Montmajour and Arles.  The fields are interspersed with small farm buildings with their red-topped roofs, the colour of which not only acts as a contrast to but seems to enhance the colour of the surrounding fields.  In the middle ground we can see a blue cart which is often cited as a secondary title to the painting.  He painted the scene in June 1888 and he believed it to be his best work to date.  It was at a time when the summer heat was beginning to intensify and the life-restoring radiance of the Mediterranean sun was his constant companion.  He once described this light  in a letter to his brother:

“….a light that for want of a better word I shall call yellow, pale sulphur yellow, pale golden citron!  How lovely yellow is!  And how much better I shall see the North!….”

Preliminary sketch of Harvest at La Crau (Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University)

Van Gogh made two preliminary drawings of the work and the provenance of one shows that on the death of her brothers Vincent and Théo in 1890, it came into the possession of Willemina van Gogh, their younger sister.  It is now at the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, a bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop.  If one compares this preliminary sketch with the finished painting one can see that the space in the finished painting has been expanded and the viewpoint is much higher.  There is a much more gradual retreating of the plain as it runs off towards the towers of the Montmajour Abbey, which can be seen in the left background, and further back to the distant hills.

A later drawing of the scene (NGA Washington)

After he completed the painting he made two further drawings of the scene.  One of which is entitled Harvest – The Plain of La Crau, which he gave to his friend, John Peter Russell, an Australian artist and which can now be seen at the National Gallery of Art in Washington where it is part of the Mr and Mrs Paul Mellon collection.

I love this painting.  It is a truly inspiring painting.  Inspiring?  As I look out of my window at the falling rain and the dark grey rain-laden clouds, it inspires me to return to Provence and bask once again in the warm sunlight, take in the golden colours of the plains, interspersed occasionally with the blue and violet colours of the fields of lavender and of course be in awe of the azure colour of the nearby Mediterranean.

Oh, for the winter to end so that I can travel again!