Landscape with character

In 1918 the war that had emptied Paris of its young men was in its final months, and Chaim Soutine, a painter from a poor Jewish village near Minsk, was 25 and almost unknown. He had reached the city five years earlier and was living hand to mouth among the artists of La Ruche. Here the ground itself seems to lurch. Soutine's landscapes rarely sit still. The hills lean, the paths twist, and the small human figure is nearly swallowed by all that movement. Within a year the dealer Leopold Zborowski would send him south to paint, and it was there that this restless way of seeing the countryside took its full shape. The canvas later passed to Paul Guillaume, one of the first dealers in Paris to believe in him, and it hangs today among his collection at the Orangerie.