House Portraits Dossier:
Garden Cottage,
near Grasse
The client asked me over and I strolled through the grounds of this quaintly English-seeming property, having my first ideas and day-dreaming a little; when she appeared it turned out that the commission was for a picture of the garden cottage, not the mansion!
No matter, this charming little house had character enough of its own, with a veranda, an old stone bench round a tree, the ubiquitous metal French garden chairs & table, an old bell (used to bring the workers from the orchards and olive groves) as well as, indoors, a spiral staircase that gave me a theme for the 360° views I wanted to intertwine in the composition. A storm gathers over the hills to the north, as it always seems to do.
I was accompanied in my sketching by a large loafing dog who snoozes in the foreground. The two sketches that follow give an idea of the way in which I tried to explore the fascination and charm of the building's essential simplicity, a building which in a photograph might merely have seemed small and featureless...
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