Landscape at Vence

Catalogue entry

Jean Marchand 1882-1941

N05101 Landscape at Vence 1927

Inscribed 'J. Marchand' b.r.
Oil on canvas, 19 5/8 x 24 1/8 (50 x 61)
Bequeathed by Lady Henry Cavendish-Bentinck 1940
Prov: With Léon Marseille, Paris (purchased from the artist); with Independent Gallery, London; Lord Henry Cavendish-Bentinck, Underley; Lady Henry Cavendish-Bentinck, Underley
Exh: [?Paintings and Pastels by 19th and 20th Century French Masters, Independent Gallery, London, June 1928 (18) as 'Coup de Mistral']

This is a view at Vence (Alpes-Maritimes), with the old seminary of Vence on the left and the road from Cagnes to Vence in the bottom right-hand corner. The Matisse chapel has since been built on the low ground to the right.

The picture was bequeathed simply as 'Landscape', but Cyril and Claude Adams, who remembered selling it to Lord Henry Cavendish-Bentinck from an exhibition at the Independent Gallery about 1926, thought that its original title was 'Coup de Mistral' (Gust of the Mistral). Léon Marseille, through whose hands it originally passed, also referred to it in a letter of 15 June 1954 as 'Coup de Mistral' and dated it 1927. It was possibly the painting of this title exhibited at the Independent Gallery in June 1928, though the dimensions given for this in the catalogue, 17 1/2 x 22 1/2in, do not quite correspond. However a different painting called 'Coup de Mistral à Vence' was included in Paintings and Drawings by Jean Marchand at the Independent Gallery in June-July 1922 (9), and is reproduced in The Dial, LXXIII, 1922, between pp.388-9. Its dimensions were not given but its proportions correspond to those of the picture exhibited in 1928, so it may have been shown again then, and not N05151.

Published in:
Ronald Alley, Catalogue of the Tate Gallery's Collection of Modern Art other than Works by British Artists, Tate Gallery and Sotheby Parke-Bernet, London 1981, p.484, reproduced p.484

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