William Malherbe French, 1884-1951

In 1943, Europe was burning. William Malherbe, a Frenchman in self-imposed American exile, carrying the psychological weight of not one global conflict but two, picked up his brush and filled a canvas with poppies. Crimson and rose and magenta, tumbling from a round glass vase on a white-draped table, surrounded by daisies and marigolds and trailing wisps of forget-me-not blue. Malherbe was born in 1884 in Senlis. He began showing work in the capital at eighteen, restless and curious, moving between Cubism, Fauvism and Neo-Impressionism before settling into something that was entirely his own. He counted Renoir and Bonnard among his personal circle. The war did not leave Malherbe intact. Four years of service produced a painter so withdrawn that Time Magazine, encountering him in the aftermath, described him as almost pathologically shy. Yet that same experience gave his art its undertow of hard-won joy. The 1930s brought recognition at the Salon d'Automne and a coveted association with the Galerie Durand-Ruel: the legendary Paris house that had built its reputation by staking everything on the Impressionists at a time when nobody else would.

In 1939, as the Nazis moved across Europe, Malherbe was fifty-five years old. He packed up his life and crossed the Atlantic, settling eventually on a farm in Thetford, Vermont, and spending summers on the working harbour at Gloucester, Massachusetts. He exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C. to considerable success. Americans, it turned out, were hungry for exactly the kind of luminous, life-saturated painting that Malherbe had spent a lifetime perfecting. A Harmony of Colour belongs to this period, painted four years into his American exile, in the middle of the deadliest conflict the world had ever seen. He returned to France in 1948. Works from his hand now hang in the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris. But it is paintings like this one - made in obscurity, in a foreign country, in the middle of a catastrophe - that reveal the true measure of the man.