French Watercolour, Stone Bridge, 1926

Period
1926, French

Size
12⅝ x 16¼ inches, framed

A French watercolor of a stone bridge, signed lower right and dated 25 avril 26, the name illegible. A specific day rather than a year means it was painted sur le motif, outdoors in front of the subject, rather than worked up afterward in a studio.

The bridge and the buildings above it appear twice, once in stone and once in the still water below. The reflection is the best passage, worked wet into wet so its edges bleed and dissolve the way water actually behaves. Blues and greens carry the picture, with the paper left bare wherever sun catches the stone, and the blues granulate where pigment has settled into the tooth of the rag paper. The arches went down in single loaded strokes, quickly and without correction.

The sheet no longer lies flat: a tide line to the backing board records old moisture exposure, and the paper has cockled into soft ripples that show in raking light. The pigment is stable and the paper intact, and the frame has corner losses and edge wear.

Historical Context
The backing carries the label of Paul René, Tableaux Cadres Gravures, 82 bis boulevard du Montparnasse, opposite the church of Notre-Dame-des-Champs. The telephone number dates the framing: Paris used three-letter exchange prefixes, here DANton 75-18, until the system went all-numeric in 1963. Montparnasse across those decades was the center of the Paris art world, and a framer working opposite Notre-Dame-des-Champs was working for its painters. So the picture was painted in 1926, kept, and framed some years later in the quarter where that mattered.