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Provenance: Charles Hall Thorndike, by whom acquired directly from the artist.
Anonymous sale, Bellier, Paris, 6 July 1999.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.

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Exhibited: Cologne, Galerie Gmurzynska, The Impact of Chaïm Soutine, November - December 2001, p. 150 (illustrated).
New York, Cheim & Read, The New Landscape, The New Still Life: Soutine and Modern Art, June - September 2006, n.p. (illustrated).

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Notes: VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price and at 15% on the buyer's premium
Esti Dunow and Maurice Tuchman will include this painting in their forthcoming supplement to the Soutine catalogue raisonné.

Soutine first visited Cagnes-sur-Mer in the South of France in 1918 in the company of Amedeo Modigliani. The following year he visited Céret in the French Pyrenées near the Spanish border and, supported by his dealer Léopold Zborowski, lived and worked there for three years, occasionally returning to both Cagnes and Paris. The impact of this trip on his work was immediate and intense. The dark, brooding atmosphere of his portraits and still-lifes was countered by a new sense of colour and space. Soutine had probably not left Paris since his arrival there in 1913, and was thus encouraged and sponsored by Zborowski to journey through the French countryside in order to expand his influences, in particular removing the overbearing dominance of the Louvre's Old Master paintings in his work. 'Away from the museums and galleries of Paris - and it must always be remembered how deeply responsive Soutine was to his visual environment - Soutine took great strides forward... During the Céret period Soutine, in his utter reliance on spontaneous execution, with its leaning towards the abstract, most fully embodied the expressionist vision' (M. Tuchman et al, op. cit., pp. 19-20).

Painted circa 1918 on his first trip to the region, Paysage du Midi is a rich and expressive example of Soutine's most successful landcapes from this important period in his creative development. The sense of movement and instability Soutine creates, emanating from both his swirling, tempestuous brushstroke and his subtly varied palette, engenders a sense of claustrophobia that Soutine never managed to dispel from his art. At the same time he balances this sense of movement with a solidity in the white buildings in the middle ground, a technique he was to use to great effect in his most successful compositions executed in Cagnes in the early 1920s.