This gouache of Menton is a good illustration of the artist’s more structured style of the 1950s, in which the drawing of shapes takes precedence over the touches of colour that will be less calm in the following decade.

The houses on the quays of the old town of Menton are an opportunity to compose a whole group of parallelepipeds standing like skyscrapers in a stormy Côte d’Azur sky. They are in the colours of the city’s citrus fruits, lemons and oranges.

Fishermen’s boats on the shoreline bring horizontal curves in successive layers to the bottom of the composition.

Sandwiched between a glowing “wave” in the foreground and a stormy sky in the background over the barely evoked Alps, the forms stand on their own, with a few trees with yellow branches vegetating this very mineral landscape of the old town.