Roger Maximilien Dubois was born in 1894 and killed in 1918. He was twenty-three years old when he painted Paysage Estival, and he had one year left to live. That knowledge changes how you look at a small canvas of a summer landscape — modest in size, intimate in character, the kind of painting a young man makes because he loves to paint and because the world in front of him, for a moment, is simply beautiful. 1917 was the third year of the war. Where he was when he painted this we do not know. What he was looking at — a field, a treeline, the light of a French summer afternoon — he set down with a directness and freshness that speaks of genuine talent still finding its full expression. Small-format paintings of this kind — made quickly, outside, for the love of it rather than for exhibition — are often where a painter's real quality is most visible. There is no room for concealment in a panel of ten by thirteen inches. Every mark counts. The handling here has the confidence of a painter who has absorbed the Impressionist tradition — broken colour, direct observation, the light of the motif caught and held — and who is making it his own. Almost nothing has been written about Dubois. His career lasted a handful of years, his output was small, and the war ended it before the wider world could take notice. What survives is rare. A signed and dated oil on panel of 1917 — the year before his death — is not simply a painting. It is very nearly all that remains.