Wendela Boreel: Summer In A Seaside Town On The French Riviera

Artist Wendela Boreel loved the South of France and made it her home- and it shows!

Depicted here is a town on the Cote d'Azur - Villefranche, perhaps, filled with sunlight and warm mediterranean colours, the sea and sailboats just about visible in the background

Painted in the 1930s or 1940s, the painting has the "joie de Vivre" typical for the French Riviera.

Wendela was born in France in 1886 to an American mother and a Dutch diplomat father. She came to live in England when her father was posted to London. The family had a home on Tite Street, just up the road from Oscar Wildes house. Wendela became friends with her neighbour Frank Schuster, and moved in the circles of John Singer Sargent, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Edward Elgar, Siegfried Sassoon, W.B. Yeates, Thomas Hardy and Roger Fry. Wendela studied at the Slade School of Art, and attended Walter Sickerts evening classes. As her outstanding talent manifested itself, she soon became Sickert's proteg and assistant. Boreel's first solo exhibition was in 1919 at Walker's Gallery. She also had shows at the New English Art Club, the Allied Artists Association, and the London Group. Widowed at the age of only 39, she returned to the South of France.

Works by Wendela Boreel are held in the Government Art Collection, the V%26A Museum as well as in the British Museum in the UK. The Museum of Modern Art MOMA in New York also possesses a work by her.

The paining presented here is an oil on thin paper, mounted by the artist on thick paper or board (which created some cockling to the upper right as per photo). The artwork is framed behind glass - the framing being original, as conceived by the artist herself. A large piece, the painting alone measures 74 x 50cm, the overall framed size being 93 x 70cm