Technical information
- Title : The Red Roofs
- Date : c. 1940
- Technique : Oil on cardboard
- Dimensions : 27 × 34 cm
- Location : Private collection
Biographical / historical context
This village landscape belongs to the series of southern views that Breuillaud favoured, where the mineral warmth of façades and roofs converses with the distant line of the relief.
At the beginning of the 1940s, he often reduces his compositions to essentials: a cluster of houses, a few structuring trees and, beyond, a chain of hills or mountains.
Rather than an exact topography, the subject is treated as a synthesis of sensations: roofs, volumes and colours become elements of a single rhythm. The dominant presence of red tiles, which gives the work its title, immediately frames the painting as a chromatic construction.
Formal / stylistic description
Space unfolds in superimposed planes: in the foreground, dark vegetal masses and sloping ground; in the middle distance, a group of light buildings with red roofs; and in the background, mountains rendered as broad bluish and violet volumes.
A few slender verticals—especially cypresses—punctuate the composition and serve as visual markers.
The palette combines reds and ochres for roofs and earth, deep greens for foliage and greyed blues for the relief.
Brushwork is lively and sometimes conspicuous, favouring modulated blocks of colour over detailed description; contours remain supple, lending the village an enveloped, almost atmospheric presence.
Comparative analysis / related works
Clusters of houses and village views are a recurring motif in Breuillaud’s work, often associated with a construction based on colour masses.
Here, the density of the built forms is counterbalanced by the openness of the sky and the stepped mountains, a procedure frequently used in his corpus to avoid a block‑like effect.
Compared with more strictly architectural landscapes, this work privileges a balance between built form and nature: the village is embedded in a vegetal framework, and colour—more than line—ensures overall cohesion.
Justification of dating and attribution
The dating to c. 1940 is consistent with the economy of means typical of oils on cardboard and with the manner of treating the mountains as simplified, large volumes.
The palette—alternating frank reds and muted blues—and the construction in planes correspond to a period in which Breuillaud seeks a clear synthesis of motifs without losing the vibration of his touch.
The attribution is reinforced by the visible signature at lower left and by stylistic constants: architecture reduced to light volumes, vegetation treated in rounded masses, and the use of verticals (cypresses) as counterpoints to the horizontal spread of the landscape.