Near Valence

The countryside near Valence in southern France gave Bone a subject somewhere between his British architectural studies and his Spanish atmospheric landscapes. The Rhône Valley landscape, with its agricultural patterns, village architecture, and the distant silhouette of the Vercors plateau, combines topographic interest with atmospheric richness in a way that appealed to Bone's dual instincts as both an architectural draftsman and a landscape watercolorist. The watercolor and graphite medium captures both the precise structure of the buildings and the atmospheric distance of the hills.

Valence and its surrounding countryside had been painted by many British artists before Bone, but his approach was distinctive. Where earlier artists had emphasized the picturesque charm of the French provincial landscape, Bone emphasized its structural qualities — the relationship between the agricultural pattern of the foreground and the geological structure of the distant plateau, the way the village architecture fits into the landscape like masonry into a wall.

Near Valence is Bone combining architectural and landscape drawing in a single composition. The village is rendered with his usual structural precision, but it sits in a landscape that is equally precisely observed, and the relationship between building and setting is the drawing's true subject.