Arcadia in Provence: Wilfrid and Jane de Glehn and Lucien Monod.
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In the 1920s, Provence offered Wilfrid and Jane de Glehn and Lucien Monod more than a change of climate. It gave them a renewed working life. After the rupture of the First World War, the region became a place where painting could once again be folded into the rhythm of the day: mornings with easels under the shade of umbrellas, afternoons of conversation, and a sense that art might grow out of a fractured world. At the centre of this new life stood Lucien’s house, Clos St-Jacques north of Cannes, which became a gathering point for the de Glehn-Monod circle from 1920 onwards. From there, they moved outward into Biôt, Saint-Cassien, Fréjus, Saint-Tropez, Carros, turning the region into a living cadence of work in the golden age of travel.
What they found there was not entirely new. Their years with John Singer Sargent had already taught Wilfrid and Jane how to work in semi-enclosed, cultivated settings: the Palazzo Barbaro in Venice, villa gardens in Frascati and Florence, and the shaded paths of the Alhambra. Sargent’s great gift was not only his eye, but the way he made painting seem continuous with travel and friendship. Provence didn’t reproduce that earlier world, but it preserved its method. The harbour at Saint-Tropez, the cypress-shadowed walks at Saint-Cassien, the garden at Clos St-Jacques, and the hill-top towns around Cannes all offered a similar condition: spaces in which observation, kinship and painting remained in balance. In that sense, the Provençal years were not simply a sequel to the Sargent years, but a quieter afterlife.
Each of the three artists responded differently. Wilfrid and Lucien used the region structurally. In Carros and the Vallée du Var, or before the Baôu of Saint-Jeannet, they found not just scenery but strong compositional armatures: escarpments, walled towns, terraces, bridges cast in sudden descents of light. In the Vallée de Roquefavour, near Marseilles, the broad sweep of land filled with ancient monuments opened into a more panoramic mode; at Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, medieval architecture gave their watercolours a measured gravity. Jane worked more intimately. At Saint-Cassien she painted afternoon shadows rather than the brilliance of the day; at Tourrettes-sur-Loup and Fréjus she responded to the quotidian life of the inhabitants and enclosed, traditional familial routines. What united them was not a similarity of manner, but a shared sense that plein air painting was something that must be lived through rather than merely viewed.
Their interest in medieval and ancient subjects found a natural ground here. Provence and the Riviera gave them more than colour and heat; they gave them continuity with older Europe. Biôt was an ancient hill town, marked by towers and by the long history of pottery and craft. Carros, with its twelfth-century château and commanding views, offered a setting where topography and history were inseparable. At Saint-Cassien, monastic enclosure, cypresses and sandy paths carried something of the old world into the present. Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, too, with its ecclesiastical and fortified remains, fed that same attraction to places where history was not buried but built into the very surface of daily life. For artists trained in Paris, these were not picturesque curiosities, but notions that the past could still structure the modern image.
Saint-Tropez introduced another register altogether. Here the harbour front was not a backdrop but an open-air theatre on the quayside; the merchants it players, the boats its property. Side by side, Jane, Wilfrid and Lucien all painted the port town, the bustling harbour, and their circle returned repeatedly because the life of the quay offered motion, labour, and leisure all in the same breath. Antibes, too, entered this orbit, with its sea light and pin parasol trees, while the roads between Cannes and the interior allowed movement between port, garden, hill town and valley within a single season. Provence was not one subject but many, and the richness of the work comes partly from that variety.
What is most striking, looking across these years, is how often the work passes from outside to inside without losing its freshness. Wilfrid’s later studio life, with his modern models and carefully arranged interiors, still carry the discipline of outdoor structure. Jane’s paintings preserve the intimacy of inhabited, and intimate spaces, whilst Lucien – in his golden years - commit himself to roses, cut from his walled garden at Clos St-Jacques, bring the Riviera indoors in another key altogether. Provence, then, was not just where they painted in the 1920s, it was where a way of living with art - first introduced by Sargent - found one of its most encapsulating and enduring forms.
A fully illustrated catalogue for CURATED can be viewed below.
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