Etienne Mein, Oedipus and Antigone at Sunset, Signed Oil on Canvas, circa 1900, Framed

An orange disc sits low on the horizon, the only warm note in a field of blue and green. Everything in the picture that is not that sun is painted flat and thin.

Oil on canvas, unlined, 12 x 15 inches (30 x 38 cm), 17 x 20 inches (43 x 51 cm) framed. Signed on the reverse. French, circa 1900, in a moulded silvered frame.

Two dark figures stand at the top of a rise, one bent over a staff, the other close beside, and a flock comes up the slope behind them. The flock is the only heavily worked passage. Five or six animals are fully modelled, their backs caught in ridges of thick straw yellow and their legs carried down into the grass in thin dark strokes, while the pink and blue of the ground layer shows through between them. The standing figure reads as one dark mass from across a room, but three warm ambered touches are held back inside it, at the face beneath the hat brim, at the hand on the staff and at the hem. The sun is ridged in a fan of brushmarks with a pale rim where it meets the hill, and its light comes back only twice, in low pink streaks across the valley.

The canvas has not been lined, restretched on a later stretcher and held with metal clips, stable throughout with light surface dust.