Grape Harvest

Oil on canvas c.1970.

In 1955 Gross bought a house at Le Boulvé, a small village in hill country, some 60 kilometres north of Montauban. When he retired from The Slade he spent the months from May until October each year painting at Le Boulvé, making oils and watercolours, seven days a week, always painting directly from nature. Subjects and locations were carefully considered, decided in advance, and Gross often returned to a place to do further work on a painting.

‘No other British artist of the mid-twentieth century approached their own topographical backyard with quite the consuming absorption of Gross in southwest France. ...There is little nostalgia in Gross’s art, such as there was in that of other ‘neo-Romantic’ contemporaries: in fact, elements of Gross’s evolving horizons were able to reflect an all-round awareness of the world, highly contemporary and forward-looking on one hand and, on the other...an acute consciousness of the enduring values of the past in an ever-changing present.’ – Julian Freeman, 2021.