Swimming Pool, Southern France

Following successful winter sojourns in the United States in the mid-twenties, the Laverys returned to the Riviera at the end of the decade. In the winter of 1928, they rented Villa L’Enchantement from Mrs Benjamin Guinness, a rustic guest house in the grounds of her estate across the valley from Mougins, and a mere fifteen minutes-drive from Cannes on the road to Antibes. Rudyard Kipling, who rented the house in 1934 tells us that it was equipped with three bathrooms and had a large studio on the ground floor. This was to be Lavery’s base until March 1929, and from where the painter visited the nearby hotels and wealthy clients. The following year they returned to Cannes, this time to stay in a house in the ground of the Hotel Beau Site, where Lavery’s wife, Hazel, felt much more at home. The previous year she had complained bitterly about the privations of the Guinness house.

A few commissions were executed in the area, as well as landscapes showing the vineyards and the hilltop village. Lavery also painted sketches and a study for The Blue Swimming Pool (Private collection), an attractive subject that reiterates pool-side pictures recently completed in Florida and at the Chiswick Lido. The present picture is thought to represent the opposite end of the ‘blue swimming pool’ where the artist stood with his back to a sweeping panorama of the distant Esterels and took in an as yet unidentified villa, semi-classical pool house and shaded seating area, above which we see what is likely to be the nearby Mougins hillside. Although the present picture could have been painted on either of these two trips, the first, in 1928, seems the more likely. While the precise location of the pool, however, remains to be confirmed in on-going research, we note that the painter’s deliberations are observed by a girl at a window on the right.

We are very grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for preparing this catalogue entry.