'Landscape In France'
Provenienza : [Propriété non datée]
- Mrs Gordon, as of 1948
- A private collection
Exhibited : London, Tate Gallery, Exhibition of Contemporary South African Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, organised by the South African Association of Arts, 1948-1949, no. 96.
Literature :
Note : For most of her career, Sumner worked away from her South African contemporaries in Europe. On completing her studies in Oxford, Sumner moved to Paris in 1926, where she enrolled in the Ateliers d'Art Sacré. The Ateliers' founders, George Desvallières and Maurice Denis, introduced the young artist to the works of Cézanne, Renoir and Vuillard. Sumner was inspired, finding "a lively spirit of adventure, a richness of colour and a perfection in taste that I had not found in the London School of Painting". The Spanish expatriate painter, Maria Blanchard (1881-1932), was also a key influence on Sumner. The two women became great friends when they shared a house together in the Rue Bolard in 1929. This was a particularly happy period for Sumner; she later commented on the congeniality of the apartment with its "unusual and delightful...tiny garden". Rue Bolard and its environs provided subject matter for many of Sumner's early paintings, including the present lot. The artist showed a number of these works in her first public exhibition at the Salon d'Automne in 1930. A second exhibition at the Salon des Tuileries quickly followed in 1931. Press notices were favourable and prompted Sumner to hold her first solo show at the Galerie Druet in 1932. Sumner would continue to work in this naturalist vein until the 1940s. Returning to Paris after the Second World War, she was exposed to the Rayonist movement, encouraging her own experiments with fragmentation and abstraction. Bibliography F. Harmeson, Maud Sumner: Painter and Poet, (Pretoria, 1992), pp.16-20.
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