Emile-Othon Friesz, like Braque and Dufy, was born in Le Havre. He was a childhood friend of Dufy, who moved with him to Paris to study fine art. It was there that Friesz met Matisse, Vlaminck and Marquet, with whom he exhibited at the watershed 1905 Salon d’Automne, in which the strictures of the Academy were broken and Fauvism was given its name. Yet, he quickly tired of both Fauvism and Paris, and within three years was back in Normandy having abandoned pure colour for a more muted palette.

In ‘Nus dans un paysage’ Friesz subverts traditional stereotypes. While the figures adopt classical contrapposto, their flattened and heavily outlined figures have a modernist rhetoric. Friesz approaches the body with dynamism, depicting the bodies integrated within the landscape through echoing the shape of the hills and movement of the trees. Friesz’s use of earthy tones and angular figures in this period is no doubt influenced by Cézanne, whose own bather series was completed just a few years earlier.

Between 1908-09 Friesz painted a series of nudes in a bucolic landscapes. A number of these are in important public collections such as Musée du Petit Palais, Geneva; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Le Havre; Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Straatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden and Nasjonal galleriet, Oslo. A similar, but smaller, companion piece entitled ‘Paresse, Cassis’ which had been in the collection of the pre-eminent collector and patron of Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist art, Saidie Alder May, was for over eighty years in the collection of Museum of Modern Art, New York.