‘His work in that exhibition was fine, dark and blocked. It was hard to see what his next move would be. One picture was different from anything he had done. It was at Tréboul, of a woman mending nets against a white cottage. This was simple and mystic.’Money worries pressed him still harder. He asked Clare Wood to pay the rent on the house in Minton Place; Frosca’s affairs had undergone a reverse because she was subsidising her brother-in-law. And so, with the threats of creditors and the praises of Cocteau and Georges Auric humming in his ears, Wood left Paris in early June to return to Tréboul.He stayed this time in the Hôtel Ty-Mad itself, looking over the sea. In a period of about six weeks, from early June to late July, Wood painted in a frenzy. He completed almost forty canvases, about one a day.Later accounts of Keats’s extraordinary summer of 1819 – scraps of paper, birdsong, coughing – were burdened with significance they cannot really have had. Christopher Wood’s summer of 1930 seemed to have the makings of myth even as it was being lived.The Ty-Mad was completely unlike the hôtels de grand luxe he had frequented with Tony Gandarillas along the shores of the Mediterranean.
