This page was made for you. It tells the story of this painting, the extraordinary man who made it, the corner of France he painted it in, and the long life he lived.
Two slender trees rise near the center, their branches reaching across a pale sky, and behind them the hills of southwestern France roll away in soft bands of wheat gold and sun-bleached ochre. The foreground is alive with short, loaded strokes of sage and olive green, with the odd flick of turquoise cutting through. It is a warm afternoon in the countryside, held still.
What makes it work is the harmony. Every color belongs to the same family, sage, gold, pale blue-grey, russet, so nothing fights or shouts. The whole surface feels settled and sure of itself, the work of a painter with nothing left to prove. Then step in close, and it comes alive. The strokes are quick and decisive, some scraped thin, others standing up in little ridges of paint you could almost feel. From across a room it is calm. Up close it is full of energy. That is a hard balance to strike, and this painting strikes it.
There is a serenity here that is worth pausing on, because of who painted it and what his life had already held. This is not the work of someone straining for attention. It is the work of a man who had already proven himself more than once, and in more than one world, and had arrived somewhere calm. You can feel that ease in every stroke.
This is one of the most remarkable lives behind any painting I have handled. Henri Anspach was born in Brussels in 1882, and his first calling was not art. It was fencing. He was one of the best in the world. At the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm, he stood on the very top of the podium, an Olympic champion, winning gold in the team epee for Belgium. He competed with all three fencing weapons at those Games. He had reached the summit of his sport.
But he did not stop there. Having reached the summit of his sport, Anspach also became a painter, and not a casual one. He studied seriously and earned his place in the great galleries of Paris. He refused to be only a champion, or only an artist. He insisted on being both. There is a rare courage in that, in not letting a single success become the whole of who you are, and in having the nerve to keep beginning new things.
He did not do it casually. He trained seriously, studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Liege under Leon Frederic, one of the masters of Symbolism, a painter honored at the 1900 World's Fair in Paris and later made a Baron by the King of Belgium, whose works hang today in the Musee d'Orsay and major American museums. That is who taught Anspach how to see.
Then he went to Paris and earned his place in it. He exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Francais, the Salon d'Automne, and the Salon des Independants across the 1910s and 1920s. The Salon d'Automne was the very room where the wild colorists called the Fauves had exploded onto the scene, and where Cezanne was given his grand memorial tribute. These were the rooms where modern art itself was being argued out, and Anspach hung his paintings in them. The champion had become a real artist. This painting is the fruit of that second life.
On the back of the panel, the painting carries a title: Noueilles, a tiny village of a few hundred people in the Lauragais, the rolling farm country that stretches southeast of Toulouse in the deep southwest of France. So this is the place the painting shows. And it was Anspach's own country. He spent the later decades of his life in this region, and he died here. The landscape he chose to paint was the one he lived inside.
The Lauragais is one of the loveliest and least-known corners of France. It is a wide, gentle landscape of wheat fields and sunflower rows that turn the whole country gold in summer, laced with the old Canal du Midi. Centuries ago it was one of the richest regions in France, its fortune built on a blue dye made from a plant called woad, so prosperous it was nicknamed the pays de cocagne, the land of plenty. That warm, golden abundance is exactly what Anspach painted.
And just to the northwest glows Toulouse, la ville rose, the pink city, named for the rosy terracotta brick its buildings are made from, which turns to warm coral at sunset. This is the light Anspach lived inside at the end of his long life, and the light that fills your painting.
The painting was later found far to the north, in Paris. From that great city, it has traveled across the world to reach you.
The painting's journey: from the Lauragais, where Anspach lived his later years, to Paris, where it was found, and now across the world to you.
Henri Anspach lived to the age of 96, and what a stretch of history that was to live through. He was born when the horse was still the fastest thing on most roads, and he lived to watch a man walk on the moon on television. Within that astonishing span, he lived not one life but two: first a world champion, then an artist. Here is the world that moved past him while he did it.
This is an oil painted on panel, which is rigid and stable but appreciates a steady, dry environment. These are the basics of keeping it beautiful for the decades ahead.
Every painting that leaves Raw Brush goes to someone I will probably never meet. I film a short message for each one, so that at least once, you hear directly from the person who found it.
In this video I share what drew me to this painting, and a genuine thank you for trusting me with your walls.