#leisure

Took him something like two years, from what I can find — a pile of small studies done out at the park, then the big one built up indoors. The speckled border round the edge is his as well; he added it later so the thing wouldn't have to sit inside somebody else's gold frame.

The title comes from a line in a Baudelaire poem, apparently — luxury, calm, pleasure. He'd spent a summer down on the Mediterranean coast with a painter who worked entirely in separate little dots, and it looks like he tried the method on for size here before heading off somewhere else with it.

Apparently the enormous trees that turn up over and over in his landscapes get traced back to a stint in Italy filling sketchbooks with old villa gardens, or so I've read. Big decorative pictures like this were often ordered to fill a particular wall in somebody's house — furniture, more or less, for people who could afford painted furniture.