Thatched Cottages in Spring

By 1921 Henri Martin was one of the most heavily commissioned decorators in France. The Capitole in Toulouse, the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, the Sorbonne and the Conseil d'État all carried murals by him, painted at the scale a republic asks for. The small canvases were the other half of the working life. From 1900 he owned a place called Marquayrol, above the village of Labastide-du-Vert in the Lot, and most of what he painted after that lay within a walk of the house, the same ground taken up again season after season. The separated dabs of colour come from the pointillist method he picked up in the 1890s, and he was still working that way 30 years on, loosely. He gave up his Paris studio on the boulevard Raspail in 1923 and stayed in the Lot until his death there in 1943.