Celebrated as a painter of light, Raymond Wintz enjoyed a reputation as one of the finest artists working in France in the early twentieth century. Wintz’ skill and complete command of his palette set him aside from his contemporaries. He gained a firm appreciation by critics and collectors as a leading painter of the Brittany coastline and was renowned for his charming window and balcony scenes bathed in sunshine which perfectly embody memories of holidays by the coast. Throughout his career Wintz returned to paint in the picturesque Port of Sauzon. In this later depiction of Belle Île, le Port de Sauzon, he presents a strikingly different interpretation of the same beloved location.

Sauzon is the smallest and most painterly of Belle Île's four communes, a harbour of whitewashed houses and fishing boats tucked into a narrow inlet on the island's northern coast, and Wintz has found in it a subject entirely suited to his gifts. The composition is anchored by the great rust-red sail of a fishing vessel beached in the foreground, its warm ochre cutting decisively through the cool silver of the harbour water and lending the canvas its only note of deep colour. Around it, the scene is one of unhurried maritime life: figures moving along the quay, boats at rest against the harbour wall, a horse and cart half-visible in the shadow of the buildings to the left.

The white rendered façades of the harbour houses dominate the upper half of the canvas and give Wintz the opportunity to do what he does with particular mastery — to describe the way Atlantic light falls on a pale surface, not uniformly, but with the gentle modulation of a painter who has studied that light at length and learned to trust what he sees. The shutters, touched in with green and blue, provide the only chromatic relief in an architecture that is otherwise a study in luminous white, and the open sea glimpsed beyond the harbour mouth completes the recession with a few spare, confident strokes.

Gladwell & Patterson’s history with this distinguished artist began after the Second World War. Herbert Fuller of Gladwell & Company, London, discovered the landscapes of Raymond Wintz during the pinnacle of the artists career, when he was recognised for his importance to the artistic milieu of mid-century art and was elected as President of the Jury of the Paris Salon in 1953. Since he first set eyes on Wintz’ landscapes in Paris, Herbert Fuller, and the two subsequent generations of the Fuller family of Gladwell & Patterson have continued to share the legacy of this great artist. From 1951 to the present day, our galleries historic archives reveal the unfaltering demand for Wintz’ exquisite Brittany landscapes and window scenes. The gallery has both an outstanding library of his work and a highly cultivated knowledge of his practice.