Briskly painted with a confident use of colour, Duncan
Grant’s landscapes from the 1930s are amongst the most expressive of his career
and are finally beginning to gain the recognition they deserve.

The landscape genre was explored repeatedly by Grant
throughout his career, reinterpreting his subject through myriad styles over many
decades. Beginning tentatively in the 1910s, a Cezanne-inspired medley of
parallel brushstrokes and strong lines dominated his views, which gave way to a
softer type of depiction with warmer, naturalistic colours in the 1920s. It was
in the south of France, however, amongst the vineyards, scorched trees and
rustic buildings, that Grant began to explore the genre with a renewed vigour.

Cassis held particular importance for Grant and the
Bloomsbury circle in the late 1920s and 1930s. From 1928, Grant and Vanessa
Bell made frequent visits to La Bergère, the house they rented at Fontcreuse,
just north of the port of Cassis. Contemporary accounts describe the area as
surrounded by vineyards and olive groves, and Grant repeatedly painted the
nearby farmhouses, cottages and views across the fields towards the
Mediterranean.

This composition was painted from the garden of La Bergère, looking
across sunlit rooftops towards the rising landscape beyond. The house became a regular
haunt for Grant, Bell and their creative coterie, and they returned to this
region numerous times throughout the 1930s. They were often accompanied by friends
and family, including Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard, and the town
became, in effect, a southern extension of Bloomsbury life.

Grant’s southern French landscapes rank amongst the most technically
accomplished of his interwar career. For him, Cassis provided the brilliant
light that had long attracted modern artists to the South of France. The
Bloomsbury artists were deeply engaged with French Post-Impressionism; Roger
Fry’s exhibitions and writings had helped introduce the work of Cézanne,
Matisse, Van Gogh and others to British audiences, and Grant himself was
strongly influenced by the intense colour and formal freedom of French modern
painting.

The Tate Archives hold a wealth of photographs documenting
Grant and Bell in Cassis, including images of Grant working en plein air,
donning a paintbrush and straw hat. In the open air, with no distractions from
working life at Charleston, it was here that Grant painted some of his most
lyrical landscape works.