The French painter Pierre Soulages (1919-2022) discovered Cézanne and Picasso in the late Thirties. After the war he made a decisive move towards abstract work. He immediately caught the public imagination with a new visual language: a mesh of extended strokes of dark colour in conflict with the lyrical violence of a painting style produced by the use of combs:  rubber or leather scrapers, knives, spatulas and a huge range of brushes. His canvases almost always use a non-colour, often black, but sometimes brown or cobalt blue, which he employs for the 1976 Mouton Rothschild label.

Soulages has amused himself here too by incorporating the initial letters of Mouton Rothschild.