Provençal Landscape (c. 1940)

Technical information

• Title : Provençal Landscape
• Date : c. 1940
• Technique : Oil on canvas
• Dimensions : 46 × 55 cm
• Location : Private collection *

Biographical / historical context

This work belongs to the same Provençal vein as the landscapes of 1940, yet introduces a distinctive openness through the broad expanse of water in the background. Breuillaud sets the terrestrial stability of olive groves and cultivated fields against the fluid distance of the sea, widening the sense of space and shifting the logic of the planes.

The painting reflects an interest in villages on the edge of open landscapes, where architecture gathers into a compact band. The artist favours an overall reading, retaining the essentials of masses and colours in order to make the relationship between site, vegetation and human settlement perceptible.

Formal / stylistic description

The foreground is made up of gentle hills and terraces, treated in light ochres and bluish greens, punctuated by olive trees. These trees are rendered in a highly simplified manner—rounded crowns, trunks indicated by a few darker accents—creating a network of repeated forms.

Across the middle of the composition, a horizontal band of houses in pink, beige and white tones stretches out. Volumes are deliberately schematised, yet variations of roofs and a few vertical accents are enough to enliven the built line. In the background, the sea forms a broad blue zone, almost continuous, stabilising the scene and strengthening the contrast between warm land and the cooled distance.

Comparative analysis / related works

By organising the scene into superimposed bands, the work aligns with a method of spatial construction often used by Breuillaud at this date: a vegetal foreground, a built line, then a wide horizon. The sea here plays a role comparable to that of a very low sky: it provides a calm foundation for the composition and enhances the legibility of the planes.

The painting nevertheless differs from strictly rural views through the concentrated presence of the village, treated like an architectural frieze. This solution reinforces the idea of an inhabited landscape, in which human presence and nature find a balance. The colours remain within an intentionally limited, harmonised range, bringing the canvas closer to the period’s landscapes of synthesis than to a descriptive approach.

Justification of dating and attribution

The dating to around 1940 is consistent with the simplification of volumes, the construction through large fields of colour and the economy of detail. The very unified distance—the sea treated as a continuous blue zone—corresponds to a period in which the artist privileges overall effect and the stability of the motif.

The contrast between ochre earths and softened greens, combined with frank yet restrained blues, is typical of the meridional palette at the turn of the late 1930s and early 1940s. The handling—visible but even—and a perspective built through strata rather than drawn depth further support an attribution to this chronological sequence.

Provenance / exhibitions / publications

Private collection.