
Penny Day
Head of UK and Ireland
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Sold for £22,750 inc. premium
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Provenance
With Austin Desmond Fine Art, London (as Landscape in the South of France)
Private Collection, Japan
This painting was carried out during an extended period spent by Vanessa Bell at La Maison Blanche, a house at the back of St Tropez. It belonged to Charles Vildrac, poet and Paris dealer, and his wife Rose. Bell, her three children, their two nurses and Duncan Grant went by train in October 1921, returning to England in January 1922. Several landscapes, such as this one, resulted from this visit as well as one of Bell's best paintings, her Interior with a Table, St Tropez (Tate). The view through the French doors in that work is the same – if more distant – as the present painting, with a glimpse of the Mediterranean to the right. Bell's colour here is subtle and warm, putting one in mind of her love of Corot's Italian landscapes and possibly of recent works by André Derain that she had seen in Paris.
We are grateful to Richard Shone for compiling this catalogue entry.