Notes
Our beloved Simiane
Figure 1. Jacqueline Lamba France, 1910–1993, Simiane, 1964, Signed, titled and dated “LAMBA Simiane 1964” verso, oil on paper, 23 5/8 × 33 in 60 × 83.7 cm, (JLB0083).
How could this fall-colored hill–some might call it a mountain–not bring sentimentalizing tears to the eyes now that I so miss Jacqueline? The oranges and bright greens and dim violet of the trees and shrubs of the slopes of our beloved Simiane . . . (I say “our” because even now, or especially now, I feel it as when we were together.) The expanse of the thing, as here in its autumn splendor it strikes the eye and the heart, takes over the rectangle under its sky of grey blue. And you can feel the dip between the two peaks right and left. The whole work feels to me like Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “The Windhover”: “the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!”
—Mary Ann Caws