Trois femmes sous les arbres

Three women in long, full skirts stand beneath the dappled shade of thick green trees, the paint laid on in rich, jewel-like strokes that turn the little garden into a shimmer of rose, gold and violet. Adolphe Monticelli, who spent most of his career in Marseille, painted such fêtes galantes in the last decades of his life, recasting the eighteenth-century world of Watteau through a colourist’s very personal vision; Vincent van Gogh admired him intensely and wrote in 1888 that he sometimes felt he was continuing Monticelli’s work. The painting is held in the Petit Palais, musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.