The Houses

Céret, a small Catalan town in the French Pyrenees, had already had its moment in art before Soutine arrived. Picasso and Braque worked there on Cubist pictures in the years just before the First World War. Soutine came in 1919 for more practical reasons. His dealer, the Polish poet Léopold Zborowski, paid for his room and meals in exchange for the paintings, and he stayed until 1922. This canvas shows the houses along the Rue de la République, seen from the ravine below the town. Soutine stretched them upward until they crowd out the sky, which is left as a chalky grey hardly different from the walls. The palette of browns, greys and greens is unusually muted for his Céret years. His signature sits in the lower left corner, some letters in red and some in blue.