“Environs de Castel Gandolfo”

A broad, pale road swings out of the lower right of the canvas and runs away into the trees, a single figure in dark coat and hat walking into the depth of the picture. Everything is built around two great pines leaning across the left, their trunks drawn rather than merely painted — rose, ochre, grey and warm brown, each turn of the bark caught with a draughtsman's certainty. Between them a bare, dead limb throws up three pale tendrils against the sky: the one sharp, nervous incident in an otherwise composed scene. Behind rises a screen of grey-green foliage laid in short, dry, closely worked strokes, the paint thin enough in places for the weave of the canvas to read through, so the whole mass breathes rather than sits. The organisation is deliberate throughout. The trunks stand like columns and frame the view; the road opens a measured recession; a low wall and the ochre roofs of a village close the middle distance, beneath a blue cooled and greyed until it holds its place in the design instead of leaping forward. The light is even and diffuse — two faint yellow patches on the roadway are the only sun through the canopy, and there is no strong shadow anywhere. Colour is reined in throughout, nothing of the Fauve blaze, everything subordinated to structure, with a debt to Corot and Poussin as much as to Cézanne. The result is a landscape of stillness and gravity, ordered and inhabited rather than picturesque, the small dark walker setting both the scale and the mood. Its early history is as good as a Derain of this period can have. It was taken up by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler at the Galerie Simon — the dealer who had built Cubism's market around Picasso, Braque and Gris, and whose judgement in these years is a considerable endorsement in itself. It passed to Paul Guillaume, the most discerning dealer-collector of the age and Derain's greatest champion, whose own collection now forms the heart of the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris; Guillaume exhibited the picture in London in 1929. Arthur Tooth & Sons, the pre-eminent London house for modern French painting, handled it thereafter, and it then passed into private hands, where it has remained for some seventy years. It is recorded and illustrated in Michel Kellermann's catalogue raisonné.