Lucien Lévy (he added ‘Dhurmer’ from part of his mother’s maiden name to distinguish himself from the many Lévys) was of Jewish descent, and had been born in French Algeria, a ‘pied noir’ and so was a bit of an outsider in Paris. His early training and work were as a decorator in glazes of ceramics, near Cannes, and his love of glossy iridescent blue-green translucent colour reappears in his work. He went to Paris to study painting in 1895. His work from this period is figurative, Symbolist in feeling and subject, loaded with numinous meaning. He became what was known as a ‘Painter of the Soul’.

Several of his pictures had titles referencing composers, with musical dimension, as Whistler had with his Nocturnes. Paintings from this period drew upon Beethoven’s L’Apassionata, Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and Debussy’s Prélude à l‘Aprés-midi d’un Faune. Lévy-Dhurmer also turned to landscapes around the Italian lakes, and ‘Les Calanques’ (inlets) on the steep wooded rocky Mediterranean coast between Marseilles and Cassis, but with inchoate extra-dimensional meaning beyond topography. As Jean-David Jumeau Lafond, expert on the painter, puts it: 

Using a technique reminiscent of some of his vases, he created a background that went beyond the Impressionist heritage to suggest a mysterious space. The complexity of the colours, applied in very tight strokes, creates an evocative space unlike any known style. He thus gives nature a poetic Symbolist dimension that gives the foreground a dreamlike quality.

When Lévy-Dhurmer began to draw and paint landscapes without figures, true visions of nature alone, from around 1897, he retained this vaporous and idealistic technique that gave the chosen places a particular presence … This painting is among the most expressive works created by the painter between 1897 and the beginning of the 20th century.