In the summer of 1908, when John, Dorelia and their children were on holiday in Normandy, Henry Lamb was staying nearby. He was struggling financially, and John wrote to Ottoline Morrell, his wealthy lover, pointing out a number of such artists in need of monetary assistance. Lamb had ‘just 40 francs left to carry him on through the summer and back to Paris’, he explained. ‘He is no ordinary personage and has the divine mark on his brow [...] he studies the colours of the world as though nothing else matters.’ Part of the appeal of Brittany for many artists in this period was both its cheapness and its remoteness from modernity. Lewis visited the same time that Lamb was there, claiming later that they spent a long summer together. As Lewis explained, ‘[t]he coastal villages of Finisterre [...] introduced one to a more primitive society.’ But unlike Lamb, Lewis found it a difficult environment in which to work: ‘The Atlantic air, the raw rich visual food of the barbaric environment, the squealing of the [bagpipes], the crashing of the ocean, induced a creative torpor.’ He spent his time writing rather than painting.

Lamb, too, was struck by the simple energy of the landscape. ‘The grass in the orchards and meadows is long now and the cows are kept picketted on narrow strips of over-grazed ground at the edges’, he would write. ‘It is after tea when the boys are back from school and from the sea that one has most change of sittings.’ Although sitting for artists was one way for the locals to make money, Lamb struggled to find willing subjects to sit for long. ‘If I am to do any large Breton pictures,’ he wrote, ‘I shall have to learn how to coax the right people away from their work and sit for love or money.’