1907 is a significant date for a Pinchon. It was the year he exhibited at the Salon d'Automne for the second time — the exhibition where he encountered Fauvism in full force and where its influence on his palette became permanent. The colours in this painting reflect exactly that moment: heightened, bold, pushed beyond what strict observation would demand, but anchored by a compositional intelligence that keeps the whole from tipping into decoration. The garden subject suits him perfectly. The layered greens of foliage, the flicker of flowers against shadow, the way light breaks across the scene in patches — these are the conditions under which his broken, confident brushwork is most at home. The impasto is thick in the lit passages, the strokes directional and purposeful. Nothing is blended. Everything is felt. Pinchon (1886–1943) was born and spent his life in Rouen, at the centre of the second great wave of the École de Rouen. Claude Monet, who saw his work in 1903, described him as possessing "a surprising touch in the service of a surprising eye." By 1907 that touch had absorbed Fauvism without surrendering to it — he was never interested in arbitrary colour for its own sake, but in what heightened colour could do to the experience of a landscape or a garden in a particular light at a particular moment. This work comes from the collection of the artist's family — the closest provenance to the painter himself that a work can carry.