In 1919, Harry van der Weyden produced a number of pictures recording French battlefields littered with 'shell-holes, barbed wire, stumps of trees, and all the debris of war' (The Studio, 1928, no. 412). These snippets of the Great War - like his Desolation (1919), also in our Works of War exhibition - were a 'record of destruction', as The Studio put it in their 1927 piece on van der Weyden. But over the years, the chalky greys of the Sommes gave way to the azure blues of the French Riviera, where van der Weyden found peace after the war. This view of La Mortola Bay was illustrated in The Studio's 1927 article, praised for 'its unusual lighting and skilful rendering of the drift of water across a bay ... a technical triumph of no mean order' and celebration of nature's 'power and beauty'.

Born in Boston, Van der Weyden won a scholarship to the Slade School in London when he was 19. He then studied at the Académie Julien in Paris in 1890-91, and was one of a number of American artists living and working in Paris, including Sargent, Whistler, Cassatt and Homer. He exhibited at the Paris Exposition of 1900, which the New York Times described as 'unquestionably the finest collection of works by American artists that ever before has been brought together'.

Van der Weyden lived near Étaples at Montreuil-sur-Mer on the Normandy coast, but at the outbreak of war in 1914, he left France with his two eldest sons, and all three men attempted to join the British Army as American citizens. When turned away, they returned once more claiming to be British subjects, where they were accepted. Harry's regiment was the Royal Engineers and they put his artistic skills to work, making him a camouflage officer. All three survived the war and were granted British nationality around 1920. He moved his studio to London, but travelled often to Italy and France, particularly to the Côte d'Azur.

This painting was made after the war, in 1927, and was exhibited at The Royal West of England Academy. It depicts the bay of the village Mortola Superiore in the Province of Imperia, on the border of Italy and France.