Renée Carpentier Wintz French, 1913-2003

Some coastlines a painter has to earn, and the Breton shore, with its low granite cottages and its long silver light, was one Renée Carpentier Wintz returned to for much of her life. Barques sur Crique Bretonne looks across a tidal inlet at low water, where fishing boats and a small motor launch lie grounded and afloat on the falling tide, their hulls doubled in the still creek below. Behind them a village gathers along the far shore, whitewashed houses with slate and ochre roofs drawn up around a church spire, all set against a soft grey Breton sky. The paint is handled in broad, loaded strokes, the whites of the boats and gable ends built up thickly against the cooler blues and greys of the water, with the foreshore worked in warm sand and violet along the near bank.

Renée Carpentier Wintz was a French painter who exhibited in Paris in the middle decades of the twentieth century and drew many of her subjects from the coast of Brittany, its harbours, villages and working boats. This inlet belongs to that world of small Breton ports, where the rhythm of the day was set by the tide and the fishing fleet, and where she found the quiet, unhurried scenes that suited her.