Ivan Yakovlevich Bilibin was one of the greatest masters of the national romantic trend in the Russian version of Art Nouveau, a painter, graphic and theater artist. He painted pictures and colorful illustrations of Russian fairy tales and epics. He based his works on reimagining the motifs from Russian folk and medieval art.

The watercolor “Bormes. The South of France” was painted by Ivan Bilibin when he was in exile.

Ivan Bilibin and his wife Alexandra Shchekatikhina-Pototskaya found themselves in the town of La Favière in the south of France, in the summer of 1927. With the money earned over five years in Cairo, where Bilibin had emigrated during the first emigration wave, the couple bought a plot of land where he ”…built a two-room summer cottage on the very pass to Le Lavandou commune.”

From Apollinaria Alekseevna Shvetsova’s letter, November 11, 1931:

From one side of the cottage, one could see Le Lavandou commune with its lilac mountains and blue sky, on the other — the green valley of La Favière with dark pines on a magnificent white sandy beach by the blue sea. From the house there was a path into the dark forest, depicted several times in Bilibin’s works. There the artist worked a lot and with pleasure. Many quiet, sunny landscapes of Provence were painted there.

In the presented watercolor, the artist paid special attention to the chiaroscuro effect. Bilibin studied the contrast between light and shadow in the bright sun of Provence: the brighter the light, the thicker the shadow. The border between light and shadow is sharp. It would seem that the same objects — the two trees — look completely different in color and feel in the light and in the shade. The town of Bormes shines on the mountainside, fully illuminated by the sun.

At the very beginning of the 1920s, “Russian Paris” first heard that in the vicinity of Toulon there was a wonderful town of Bormes-les-Mimosas with La Favière beach — a real petite Crimée, “little Crimea”. By the end of the 1920s — early 1930s, an entire “cité russe” (“Russian city”) appeared on this beach, which became one of the legends of the first emigration wave.