The Purple Alps is a small landscape, painted while the family was on holiday in the South of France in 1964, long before Christine emigrated there in 1971. 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 which were supported by his wife, an amateur landscape painter. From their house we could often see the foothills of the Alps in the distance – one of his tropes was that others never quite saw the “purple” in the mountains. On one of our sight-seeing trips in the area, we stopped for our picnic here, at the side of the road, so my mother could create this small landscape of the mountains. 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, many years later, my mother learned that Harry was taking medication for his high blood pressure that had the effect of enhancing the red and suppressing the blue end of the spectrum: 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: