'Matthew Smith loved France, lived in it for a great part of his life, did his best work there. to see him walk down a French street was an education in awareness' John Russell, quoted in 'Mathew Smith, exh. cat. Barbican Art Gallery, op. cit., p.29).

Smith spent the majority of the 1930s painting landscapes in the South of France. In 1932 he toured extensively between Arles and Aix-en-Provence in his car, settling for a time at Cagnes-sur-Mer in the winter of 1932-33, a coastal town between Antibes and Nice. In 1933 he returned briefly to England but spent the majority of that year and the following years in and around Aix-en-Provence.
John Russell comments that 'The chief development of his painting in the 1930s was in landscape. He arrived in the South, all passion far from spent, and responded to the landscape with all the headlong energy that he had spent, in the previous ten years, on his paintings of the nude. There is about them a quality of brio not found in, for instance, the Cornish landscapes. Like Van Gogh, he staked all on his attack. His Provencal landscapes derive, in so far as they derive from anyone, from the landscape sketches of Rubens, as well as Constable and Renoir. It was Rubens, certainly, who taught Smith how to 'place' some distant detail with what seems at first glance an almost casual turn of the brush. For the first time since the Cornish visit of 1920, Smith felt perfectly at home before a landscape subject. The series which resulted is one of the most remarkable of all his work' ('Matthew Smith', London, 1962).


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