The French Window, 1973

William Bowyer RA (1926 - 2015)

RA Collection: Art

Surrounded by yellow London bricks, this French window opens onto a domestic interior. Reversing traditional expectations of painting as a ‘window’ onto the world, Bowyer creates an introspective view of his family home where his wife Vera attends to one of their children.

The dappled sunlight evokes the artist’s interest in the French Impressionists while the multiple doorways and openings recall the work of seventeenth-century Dutch artists.

Bowyer once remarked that one of the pleasures of London was ‘a never-ending number of pictorial possibilities within a few yards of my doorstep.’