#oil

He spent his career on music halls and rented rooms rather than polite society portraits, and the sitter here was apparently a young Belgian woman he painted more than once around that time. There's also a small industry of writers who've tried to pin the Whitechapel murders on him — nothing proved, but the story trails his name around.

This came near the end of his life — the 1918 flu got him at twenty-eight, a few days after it got his wife. Early on he'd done a stretch in jail over drawings somebody decided were indecent, and from what I can find that hung over him for years afterwards.

The same jugs, cloths and bowls turn up in dozens of these — a table set up indoors and gone at for weeks on end. He worked so slowly, it's said, that the fruit went off before he was done, so he took to using wax ones.

He's known for beaches and sunlight, so a hillside of grey-brown rock was a surprise to me. Apparently he worked outdoors fast, getting a whole canvas down in one sitting, and left behind stacks of studies like this alongside the big paid-for pictures.

From what I read, the woman sitting here spent decades collecting musical instruments from all over, and thousands of them ended up going to a museum. He was doing a brisk trade in American portraits around this time, presidents included, so from what I can tell this was a commission like any other.

He had rooms looking straight out at this view and painted it again and again across the years, from what I've read. This is one of the earlier goes, well before the colour got loud.