Cypress Trees, La Colle sur Loup

The row of curved terracotta tiles running along the top of the wall throws a scalloped shadow across the pavement, and that wavy ribbon of blue-grey ends up being the most eye-catching thing in the whole picture. Everything else is a French village garden on a hot afternoon: a white wooden gate, a mailbox set into the plaster, oleanders in hot pink, and dark cypress spires pushing up into a sky painted in flat strokes of turquoise and cobalt. La Colle sur Loup sits in the hills above Nice, a few minutes from Saint-Paul-de-Vence, in the stretch of country where Matisse, Chagall and Bonnard all settled at one point or another for exactly the reasons visible here.

Jennifer Irvine is a Scottish painter who works mostly in gouache, and the medium suits her approach. Gouache dries matte and opaque, so colour goes down in confident flat patches with no blending, which is why every leaf here reads as a separate shape of lime, olive or deep blue-green. She travels through France, Spain, Italy and Greece looking for subjects like this one, usually corners rather than views: a gate, a wall, a doorway with plants spilling over it. The choice is a practical one as much as an aesthetic one, since a shaded courtyard is the only sensible place to sit and paint when the sun is that strong. Her signature is tucked into the lower right, on the wall beside the oleander.