E. Charlton Fortune is the most important California woman artist from the early 20th century. We are honored to offer her spectacular Wash Day at St. Tropez in our California Art auction on 25 April in Los Angeles.

The painting has been in one family for multiple generations, located in a British cottage for most of the century and likely acquired shortly after the artist painted it, around 1926–27. In addition to being fresh-to-market, works of this caliber and size are rare for the artist. Here, we take a closer look at Fortune’s masterwork.

Though E. Charlton Fortune is best known as one of California’s leading female plein-air painters, she spent a great deal of time living and working throughout Europe in the late 1920s—first in the artist’s colony of St. Ives on England's Cornish coast, before travelling on to the French Riviera. Wash Day at St. Tropez likely dates from the two years she spent in the South of France, when Saint-Tropez was still no more than a humble fishing village.

Fortune’s paintings are frequently labeled Impressionist; however, she moved beyond the style in many of them, a fact recognized even in her own time. She was careful to paint things and places that lent themselves to her aesthetic approach, her primary focus being on color and paint handling—the true subjects of her work. Her paintings were rarely quiet and subdued but, instead, strong in hue, frequently exploiting primary or complementary colors, and rugged in gestural execution.