Painted at Saint-Tropez between October 1921 and February 1922 when Duncan Grant was staying in the South of France with Vanessa Bell (1879-1961) and her three children, Quentin, Julian and Angelica. During the 1920s-30s Grant regularly accompanied Bell on painting trips to France, and this painting dates from a winter spent in a villa, La Maison Blance, just outside St Tropez, rented from Bell's friend Rose Vildrac. Bell and Grant both painted several canvases there, and Bell's St Tropez canvas Interior with a Table is also at Tate (N05078). The two artists worked in separate rooms in order not to influence each other. In the early 1920s Grant worked with a range of warm browns and earth colours, rejecting the brilliant colours he and Bell had used before the First World War.
South of France (1922) was owned by the Dundee collector John Tattersall (1859-1935) and purchased by the Hon. Jasper Nicholas Ridley (1887-1951) for the Contemporary Art Society in 1926 and presented by the CAS to the Tate Gallery in 1929.
