Landscape with a Red Donkey

In the early 1920s Soutine spent long stretches away from Paris, in the south of France, where his dealer Léopold Zborowski paid him a small allowance to paint landscapes. Around 1922 he made this one. A white house with a red roof sits high in the middle of the canvas, tilted, as if the ground beneath it had moved. Trees crowd around it in heavy, twisting strokes of green, all bending the same way as though a gale were blowing through. The sky is a patch of violet and cloud squeezed between the treetops. Down at the lower left a small man in a white shirt strides along a path, and beside him a smear of red gives the picture its name. The canvas, about 81 by 62 centimetres, belongs to a private collection in Spain.