André Derain, The Road

The road in this painting runs through a small village in Provence. Derain paints it bright, an indirect way of conveying the heat of a summer afternoon, and places a tree at the lower left to give the scene behind it a natural sense of distance.

The 1930s, when this was painted, found Derain stepping back from the radical styles of Cubism and Fauvism he had once embraced, returning instead to a more classical, traditional mode of painting, which is why landscapes like this one became common in his output at the time.