AB-GU-1945-004 — Le Barroux seen from Caromb (1945)

Technical information

Title : Le Barroux seen from Caromb
Date : 1945
Technique : Oil on Isorel (HSIsorel)
Dimensions : 33 × 41 cm
Location : Private collection

Biographical / historical context

This view of Le Barroux, seen from Caromb, belongs to André Breuillaud’s plein-air practice in the immediate post-war period, when he repeatedly returned to the landscapes of the Vaucluse. The Provençal motif—hilltop villages, stepped reliefs, and ridgelines—allowed him to articulate architecture and geology within a single pictorial construction.

In the mid-1940s, these landscapes reflect a search for balance between direct observation and synthesis, with a marked taste for warm tonal harmonies set against the blue-violet counterpoints of the distance.

Formal / stylistic description

The composition is organized in superimposed planes: in the foreground, a mass of ochre-yellow walls and roofs forms a base, like a promontory; at the center, the village unfolds in simplified volumes, picked out with light highlights; in the background, the hills step back in bands of slate-blue and violet beneath a broadly brushed sky.

The paint is generous, sometimes in impasto, and the brushwork remains legible: it modulates the façades, catches the edges, and animates the shadows. Dark greens of trees and thickets cut across the built forms, while the oranges and pinks of the tiles sustain the overall warmth of the scene.

Comparative analysis / related works

The painting relates to Breuillaud’s views of villages and hills made in Provence and the Comtat Venaissin, where one finds the same method of construction through flat areas of color and simplified volumes, and a distance treated in stratified bands.

The motif of the hilltop village seen from above echoes other compositions in which the artist sets the geometry of roofs against the softer movement of vegetation, seeking a synthesis between structure and sensation.

Justification of dating and attribution

The handling—alternating constructed planes with visible brushwork—corresponds to the Provençal landscapes of the Liberation period and the immediate post-war years. The palette, based on ochres and muted blues, supports a dating around 1945.

The attribution is reinforced by the painted signature at lower left, as well as by characteristic procedures (laying in masses, luminous highlights on edges, and distant hills rendered in bands).

Provenance / exhibitions / publications

Private collection.