Bernard Buffet on show at London's Opera Gallery

It’s hard to get more French than Bernard Buffet’s painting of the Place des Vosges. Buffet’s genius is to take one of the most recognisable of Parisian landmarks and make it his own. Characteristically empty of people (you never see a human figure in his landscape and cityscape painting), the harmony of the square’s early 17th-century architecture – in particular, its fenestration – lends itself to the rectilinearity for which he is famous.

Epicormic shoots emerging from the leafless pollarded trees claw at the grey skies, like a mass of skeletal hands, while crozier-shaped street lamps stand like lightless sentries. For Buffet, there is further added significance to this austere scene. In his early teens, during the occupation, he had come to know the Place des Vosges well, attending evening classes there in painting and drawing. The awkward adolescent Buffet of barely 15 years earlier was unrecognisable in the man who painted this picture in 1960. His renown was at its zenith. The New York Times had described him as one of “France’s Fabulous Young Five” alongside Sagan, Bardot, Vadim and Saint Laurent. You could hardly find an issue of Paris Match in which Buffet did not appear. How I’d love to know his thoughts as he painted this picture.

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