The River Ouse in Sussex rises near the village of Lower Beeding. From there it runs south, eventually coming to the town of Lewes before entering a valley surrounded by the Firle and Kingston Downs. It then passes a series of bucolic villages before running out to sea at Newhaven. The villages of Iford, Rodmell, Southease and Piddinghoe are all situated between the Downs to the west and the Ouse to the east.

This painting, The Ouse Near Piddinghoe, was made at one of the river bends near Piddinghoe. It was probably painted sur le motif one day in autumn. In the middle distance, the trees have coloured but not yet dropped their leaves. The warm palette of greens and ochre, blue and lilac evoke the season with vivid freshness. Bell’s home, Charleston, is no more than five miles from the spot depicted in The Ouse Near Piddinghoe. Bell and her partner Duncan Grant kept an Austin 7 at the time, and she probably drove to Piddinghoe on a bright day in September or October. It was a warm autumn that year and, in a letter to her son Julian on 10 October 1936, Bell described ‘a most lovely autumn day with really hot sun. There are still asters and dahlias out [in the garden].’

The painting clearly registers the widening of the river at Piddinghoe, referred to by Rudyard Kipling in his poem Sussex.

I will go north about the shaws
And the deep ghylls that breed
Huge oaks and old, the which we hold
No more than Sussex weed;
Or south where windy Piddinghoe’s
Begilded dolphin veers
And red beside wide-bankèd Ouse
Lie down our Sussex steers.

(Kipling’s ‘begilded dolphin’ is the weathervane atop St John’s Church; it is in fact shaped like a salmon, not a dolphin.) Bell has depicted this tidal stretch of the Ouse at a low ebb. A compositional virtue has been made of the exposed mud banks, revealed only at low tide. Several bands of broken brushstrokes step up from the surface of the water: a sliver of the bank’s flat muddy side; an area of ochre just above it, catching the light; the grassy footpath, tapering away in the distance; some scrubby fields just beyond.

The riverbank is caught between the elements and appears to hover between wide expanses of water below and sky above, one reflecting the other. Careful observation is married with a terse simplification of the scene. A classical distinction is made between the foreground, midground and background, dividing the picture into three bands. The narrow band of terra firma at the centre of the picture provides a bustling compositional focus. The rooftops of nearby cottages or farm buildings are visible over a ridge in the landscape and, taken together with the lie of the land and the course of the river, it seems that Bell’s painting was made looking upstream. The cottages may belong to an area of Piddinghoe’s scattered village.

In recent years, a reassessment of Vanessa Bell’s work has caused a critical reversal. Where her partner Duncan Grant was once universally regarded as the superior artist, being prolific and widely exhibited, Bell has more recently been singled out for praise and the qualities of her work have been studied more concertedly. A retrospective of her work was held at Dulwich Picture Gallery in 2017, with the exhibition’s co-curator Ian Dejardin evoking her as a ‘distinctive, important painter’.

The technical and formal refinements found in mid-career paintings like The Ouse Near Piddinghoe are important to a balanced assessment of Bell’s standing. As with other works of this period, the canvas is methodically painted all over in even, flat strokes of paint; there is a marked contrast here to Grant’s loaded brushstrokes. The thinness of the paint, most especially in sky and water, facilitated the atmospheric rendition of light and reflection. The all-over application speaks to the fastidious naturalism practiced in this period of Bell’s career. Other landscapes from the mid-1930s, most of them depicting the garden at Charleston and nearby scenery, demonstrate the same care and vivacity.