The Purple Alps was a small landscape painted while the family was on holiday in the South of France in 1964, long before she emigrated there in 1971. But this holiday was the planting of that seed, see the Biography for details. We were staying with the parents of one of my school mates. The father, Harry, had very definite opinions about art and how landscapes should be rendered, especially with his wife who was an amateur landscape painter. One of his tropes was that others never quite saw the “purple” in the mountains as we could often see the foothills of the Alps in the distance. On one of our sight seeing trips in the area, we stopped for our picnic at a picturesque spot on the side of the road because of the view of some of those mountains so my mother could create this small landscape. The lighting and atmospheric conditions were such that my mother was certain that she could clearly see this elusive purple that Harry was espousing.

Ironically, it was many years later that my mother learned that Harry was taking medication for his high blood pressure that the effect of enhancing the red colors and suppressing the blue end of the spectrum and he was in fact seeing the world differently from the rest of us. When he saw this painting he said “I think you are getting there and finally learning to see the purple.” You can be the judge of that.

The copy: