Jean Kevorkian French, 1933-2019

Some painters chase the grand view; Jean Kevorkian preferred the quiet bend in the river, the towpath after rain, the hour when a village settles into its own reflection. Le Mas du Lac is exactly that kind of scene. A sunlit path runs down the near bank past clumps of iris and pink wildflowers, drawing the eye towards two figures walking on beneath the poplars, where a farmhouse and its neighbours sit low among the trees of the far shore and a single boat waits at the edge of the water. The first yellows of autumn have begun to touch the leaves, and the whole world above the bank, sky, cloud and trees, is turned upside down in the water below, laid on in short broken touches and thick knife-work.

Born in Paris in 1933 and largely self-taught, Kevorkian spent his life in pursuit of exactly these moments, working in the Impressionist line of Monet and Sisley and returning again and again to the rivers of provincial France, the Seine, the Oise and the green country of the Île-de-France. He painted the seasons as they turned, and the water was almost always his subject, whether a Breton harbour or, as here, a still inland lake with a farmhouse at its shoulder.