At the centre of the seaside painting, fruit and flowers establish a sense of abundance, while gracefully draped women rest and two small boys wrestle. Beyond them, fishermen sort their catch. The white sail of a passing boat punctuates the deep blue of the water.

The restrained palette and seemingly disparate figures across a bare land created by Puvis de Chavannes invokes a timeless, pre-industrial past in a way which was fashionable at the time. Such compositions were highly influential to a generation of new artists associated with Impressionism as it moved away from neoclassical realism to herald emerging modernist techniques.

Doux pays (Pleasant land), by influential French artist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, was painted during the same period that Harriet Jane Neville-Rolfe lived in Paris after finishing her training at L’Ecole Nationale de Dessin de Jeunes Filles. She would have been aware of Puvis de Chavannes’s innovative, classically inspired paintings; his frescoes occupied prominent public spaces at the Panthéon, the Sorbonne and the Hotel de Ville. This is one of two small versions of a large wall mural Puvis de Chavannes painted for his friend Léon Bonnat and presented in the 1882 Paris Salon.