Elliott Seabrooke — Large Barn, Aix-en-Provence

Elliott Seabrooke (1886–1950)
Large Barn, Aix-en-Provence
Oil on board, 1920
Seabrooke studied under Tonks at the Slade and served as an Official War Artist in WWI, which makes this southern French landscape feel all the more charged. He came to Aix in 1920, the war barely behind him, and stood in Cézanne's own territory looking at the same quality of light. The Cézanne influence is impossible to miss, those blocky directional marks, the trees feeling almost architectural, the ochres and greens doing structural as well as descriptive work. There's an additional angle to it too. Seabrooke was in the orbit of Roger Fry, who had spent years championing Cézanne in England and translating that sensibility into his own painting. So what you're seeing here is the influence twice over, once direct and once filtered through Fry. Both of them had absorbed the same lesson, that structure and sensation are not opposites. This feels like evidence of that.