© Zygmund Landau estate

Landau’s French Landscape was most probably painted around Saint-Tropez, where the artist lived during the 1930s and 1940s. The painting is animated by a warm, vivid palette and the beautifully rendered landscape typical of South of France. The warm, rustic palette of soft oranges, yellows, greens and browns, coupled with the earthy, opaque quality of the gouache medium, employed by Landau, evokes the colours and textures often observed in the paintings of the Bloomsbury Group members. This is, perhaps, unsurprising, considering that, while in Saint Tropez, Landau shared a flat with the prominent art critic Roger Fry.