This is a very detailed watercolour of The View out of my mother’s living room window looking down the Grand Rue du Château. I think it was this view which was the big selling point and the reason she moved into the little flat/apartment. As you look down the road you see the covered terrace of one of the fine restaurants in Fayence, below that you can actually see one of the trees on the Place de l’Eglise, the main square in front of the church. Further out beyond the village there is the glider field on the floor of the valley encircled by the foothills. There may have been the usual ugliness of TV antennae’s and electrical wires across parts of the view but after awhile you just didn’t see them and my mother made a deliberate choice of not including them. Whenever she had visitors, she would always insist that they sit down opposite the window so they could admire the view even though she knew she would be competing against it for their attention.

This particular painting was given to my father who then passed it on to me. What I find very interesting is that she had painted it with tremendous attention to detail particularly in the application of color and texture unlike many of her other landscapes where she used the much freer technique of her typical line and wash style paintings.