This work by André Lhote, The French Landscape, dates from 1912 which was a pivotal year in the career of this artist from Bordeaux, who followed Picasso in a move towards cubism. Indeed, around this time he took part in the Golden Section Salon at the Boétie gallery, presenting works that employed the golden number, a supposedly divine proportion.
A theorist, Lhote was very much influenced by Cézanne and believed that life was a series of completely perfect geometric images. Looking for harmony and rhythm, he used strong and oblique lines to structure his composition, whilst at the same time creating intermediary planes bringing together characters or houses. Lhote believed that painters, like poets, had a mission to create visual rhymes.
