Saliés-de-Béarn, Pyrénées-Atlantiques

The two Salies-de-Béarn landscapes, this one and lot 338, were executed in the spring of 1928 during a trip with Eric Gill to stay in a villa at Salies, a commune in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques department in south-western France, after a visit to Chartres Cathedral. The villa was part-owned by Gill, whose presence was undoubtedly enlivening though the two did not always agree. It was an immensely fruitful sojourn for Jones, who finished a dozen large watercolours in seventeen days, mostly painted from the villa’s first floor balcony. He responded to the southern light by heightening his palette and loosening his paint structure, and clearly admired the foothills of the Pyrenees (which reminded him of the Black Mountains in Wales) which he depicted with energy and enthusiasm. The freshness of his attack is hard to resist. It was Jones’ first trip abroad since the war and he was entranced by the countryside which he connected with the troubadour legends of Le Chanson de Roland.

A.L.