Jacques Villon (1875-1963) was born Gaston Duchamp, brother of the sculptor Duchamp-Villon and the painter Marcel Duchamp. By 1911 his studio at Puteaux in the suburbs of Paris was a power-house of the Cubist Movement, and in 1913 he was included in the “Armory Show” in New York, which brought the latest in modern art before the American public. Villon’s painting at that time combined the architectural rigour of Cubism with an interest in the problems of light and colour, though he returned to more traditional forms.

An explorer as much as a painter, but always a superb colourist, Villon succeeds in the 1960 Mouton Rothschild label in capturing the movement of the birds in the static geometry of the vines.