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Grant first visited Cassis in 1927 and returned most summers until the outbreak of war. He was accompanied by his
partner Vanessa Bell and the presence each summer of many of their friends, including Virginia and Leonard Woolf,
staying at La Bergère, a substantial cottage in the grounds of a château a mile or so inland, led to the town being known
as Bloomsbury-by-Sea. Samuel John Peploe was there also in 1924, ’28 and ’30 but it is not known whether they met.
The Tate Gallery holds an archive of photographs of Grant working on canvases in the ground of the house
and our picture is without doubt a view across the fields towards the Château with the high escarpment rising in the
distance. In his portraits, Omega designs and murals Grant seems a modernist and he is present in all the survey shows
and ‘movements’ which shape our understanding of the development of British modernism. In front of the landscape he
is essentially an impressionist and Cassis is a perfect example; fresh, direct; true to place and to the day it was painted.
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