As indicated by an inscription on the back of the painting, Village Road came from the Beatrix Reynald Collection, a French woman who settled in Rio de Janeiro during the German occupation of Paris. In Rio, she generously sold her collection to donate the proceeds to the French Resistance. The dating of this small-format landscape painted with somewhat forlorn hues has not been established for sure. The painting shows the manifest influence of Vlaminck and, before him, that of Van Gogh, besides a generic affinity with the Fauve movement as interpreted by the so-called Chatou School. The work may be dated in the 1920s or 30s, at the heyday of the artist’s landscape painting.

— Unknown authorship, 1998

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