The Philadelphia modernist Arthur B. Carles was a brilliant colorist and an extraordinarily innovative painter. Though Carles trained initially at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, soaking up the more conservative teaching of William Merritt Chase and Thomas Anshutz, he was deeply influenced by the avant-garde art scene in Paris during his first trip there in 1905. During this time, he soaked up the new ideas of the avant-garde, met important fellow artists who were to remain life-long friends, and absorbed the sights and sounds of vibrant city life. He also captured his environment in numerous landscape sketches which were painted quickly on location. He referred to these quick studies as “squirts,” and they were executed on small beveled wooden panels, which could fit into slots in his portable paint box.

French Landscape is one of these spontaneous sketches, and it was probably painted during Carles’s 1921 visit to Paris. The painting is an excellent example of the Fauvist-inspired sketches that Carles produced during this period, revealing his early love of orchestrating beautiful and expressionistic color harmonies. In this study, Carles uses a bold palette of greens, oranges, blues and purples. The landscape is painted in a highly simplified manner, with an emphasis on flat planes of color. However, Carles has not yet entirely eschewed a sense of illusionistic space; his use of paler, more muted tones in the background creates the illusion of atmospheric perspective.