The challenge was to bring a touch of the south of France into the
grey Flemish microclimate. My friends chose a painting by Paul Bonnard,
a view from where he lived in the 1940s in the hills above Cannes.

It was very difficult to capture the scumbled colours he used even when working in oils,
but the results were stunning. The picture below is a similar view,
showing the same palm tree.

And here is an opaque gem of French art criticism from the local village website:

Pierre Bonnard (1867­1947) is one of the most important French painters of the first half of the century XXth and nevertheless he does not know the importance which all grant to recognize for Matisse or Picasso.

Temptation is strong to see in him only a solitary, joyful, brilliant painter, but unimportant decisive to judge the progressive progress of the art of our time.

'I am not of any school, I try only to make something of staff.'
This innate independence is for him essential in the realization of the work so much he seems to have painted only for the happiness to paint.

Bonnard affects a boldness and a lyric surprising. He wants to seize the space in its global nature through the immediate sensation, restored on the painting by the shape and the drawing, but especially in a magnificent palette where agree and oppose mallows, lilacs, and lively pink, deep greens, red and orange.