Provençal Landscape (1940)

Technical information

• Title : Provençal Landscape
• Date : 1940
• Technique : Oil on canvas
• Dimensions : 46 × 55.5 cm
• Location : Private collection

Biographical / historical context

In 1940, André Breuillaud continued an intense engagement with landscape, alternating rural views with Mediterranean motifs. At this pivotal moment, his painting moves toward synthesis: simplified masses, carefully structured balances, and colour asserted in broad, flat planes.

This “Provençal landscape” forms part of a series in which the artist studies the contours, farmhouses (mas), and trees of the South. Instead of anecdote, he opts for a structuring reading of the motif, as though seeking to “bring order” to nature through successive planes.

Formal / stylistic description

The composition is arranged in three registers. In the foreground, a pale, almost sandy zone is animated by the cast shadow of a solitary olive tree; its bluish trunk and supple branches trace an arabesque. At the centre, the architecture of a mas—geometrised volumes, orange roofs, openings sketched in—acts as a hinge between the ground and the distance.

The background is made up of superimposed hills and a mountainous relief with simplified ridges. The sky, a deep blue, offers a unified surface against the mosaic of terrestrial planes. The palette brings together muted greens, pinkish ochres and deep blues; transitions are deliberately abrupt, heightening the sense of construction. Brushstrokes are frank and broad, sometimes lightly impasted, giving the surface a compact, matte vibration.

Comparative analysis / related works

Through its economy of means and its desire to organise the landscape into broad fields of colour, this work is close to Breuillaud’s other landscapes of 1940, in which he favours a reading “by planes”: cut-out hills, architecture treated as blocks, and isolated trees functioning as compositional axes.

A similar vocabulary appears in views where olive trees serve as a graphic counterpoint: a dark trunk, foliage gathered into volumes, and cast shadows that anchor the scene. The dialogue between the ochres of the ground and the blues of the sky also points to a search for chromatic accords characteristic of this period, in which the artist avoids the picturesque in favour of a constructed harmony.

Justification of dating and attribution

The date 1940 is supported by handling and palette characteristics observed across the corpus from the same year: geometric simplification of forms, clearly juxtaposed planes of colour, an accentuation of cool/warm contrasts, and a synthetic treatment of architectural details.

The Provençal motif, the structuring presence of the olive tree, and the stepped arrangement of the hills correspond to a particularly active vein around 1940, as seen in other landscapes attributed to this period.

The attribution to André Breuillaud rests on its stylistic coherence with his known landscapes: an underlying drawing that is supple yet controlled, construction by planes, and a colour range both subdued and luminous. The broad, directional touch favours mass over detail, while retaining a sensitivity to Mediterranean light.

A signature appears to be present in the lower right corner (to be confirmed by direct examination of the original). Taken together, the material and formal characteristics argue in favour of an autograph work.