Houses at Beaulieu

This is one of the rare landscapes among Gris's tables of bottles and glasses, and it comes out of a particular year. In 1918, with the war grinding into its last months, he left Paris for Beaulieu-pres-Loches, a village in the Touraine countryside where his companion Josette had grown up. Painters across the French avant-garde were turning back to older, steadier subjects in those uncertain years, and here Gris does the same, giving a cluster of village houses the same clear-cut geometry he brought to a still life. The roofs and walls are simplified into tilted planes of ochre, green and slate, stacked up the tall canvas so the little town reads almost like a still life stood on end. He painted it during that stay in the Touraine, among people living much as they always had.