A subtle, dappled light falls upon trees, hedges and path in a manner that might remind a viewer of a work by Cézanne or Pissarro. Exploring light and shadow, volume and tonal variation are the artist Robert de Grey’s central concerns in this work. Grey would begin painting his landscapes on-site, and then revise them in the studio. This meant, not only that the final paintings were carefully refined but also that they gave an impression of
being in that particular location, rather than a sense of recalling a time or a place. Grey talks about his paintings as being born in the imagination and going beyond a sense of the place they were made in. ‘What the painting looks like,’ he said ‘is almost beyond your control because what you see, what you come to understand about what you’re looking at, is more important in the formation of the painting than a conscious desire to make it look like one thing or another’. His works were inspired by landscapes around the Thames estuary or in south-west France, which in Grey’s view were places that became more and more interchangeable, ‘… the subject of the next painting seems to grow from the one I am doing’.