She stands in the middle of it — a woman in a white dress, holding an armful of red poppies against her body, knee-deep in a field that runs from burnt orange in the foreground to blazing scarlet at the horizon. Behind her, a row of dark trees and the spire of a village church break the skyline. Above it all, that particular blue you only get in the south of France, where the light comes down hard and clean and makes every color louder than it has any right to be.

This is Emile Bellet's signature territory. He painted poppy fields and the women who walk through them for the better part of sixty years, working exclusively with a palette knife — never a brush — building up thick slabs of pigment that catch light the way stucco catches afternoon sun on a Provençal farmhouse. Bellet called himself a "self-taught heir of the Fauves," and you can see it: the same reckless, joyful color that Matisse and Dufy brought to the Mediterranean, the same refusal to let reality get in the way of how a place actually feels. The woman is not a portrait. She's every woman, or no woman in particular — an archetype, a figure moving through color the way a note moves through a chord.

Bellet was born in Provence in 1941 and started painting at five. By twelve he'd won first prize in a national art competition. By nineteen he was exhibiting. He never studied formally — the landscape was his teacher, the light his curriculum. In 1978 he completed the stained glass windows for Notre Dame de Bon Voyage in Port de Bouc. He exhibited in Cannes, Marseille, Aix-en-Provence, Tokyo, São Paulo, and across the United States, where Park West Gallery made him one of the most widely collected French artists of his generation. He lived high in the mountains of Provence and painted en plein air until his death in July 2022.

He never studied formally — the landscape was his teacher, the light his curriculum.

Hand-signed lithograph on paper. Edition of 350, this being number 251. Professionally framed in a black frame with white mat.