Stenciled on a beach – that of Biarritz – during a family holiday in the summer of 1931, this gouache shows the artist’s parents, seen from the side, seated facing the sea on a blanket spread out on the sand, wearing jackets, a beret and a city hat.

The artist’s use of the colour black alone to represent her parents, who seem to form only one in their city suits against the luminosity of the surrounding white beach, bears witness to a certain filial attachment.

The artist’s mother, Marie Célina Lacaze, née Chabres, (1887-1953), known as Jeanne, was a dressmaker by training. Born like her daughter in Bouscat, she met her husband in the Chartrons district of Bordeaux and joined him in Paris at the end of the First World War in 1918 with their only daughter Germaine, then aged 10.

The artist’s father, Pierre-Georges Lacaze (1882-1955), known as Léopold, came from a family of coopers and became a wine master, then a manager at the Deleau company in the Jussieu wine market in Paris after starting his career in the Bordeaux cellars. Of a strong-willed character, he encouraged his only daughter to take the drawing teacher’s exams at the end of her studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and at the Grande Chaumière.

The year 1931 marked the end of the artist’s studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Lucien Simon’s studio and the beginning of several years of additional studies at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Othon Friesz’s studio.