The Good Life France Magazine




The Good Life France Magazine brings you the best of France - inspirational and exclusive features, fabulous photos, mouth-watering recipes, tips, guides, ideas and much more...


Published by the award winning team at The Good Life France

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Issue No. 28

This gorgeous issue is stuffed full of fabulous features from beautiful Annecy to the sunny southern Basque country and the city of Pau, the Canal du Midi and much more. There’s a fabulous photo essay of the four seasons of Provence, practical guides and recipes galore with a focus on the gastronomy of the Touraine region in the Loire Valley - from an ancient recipe for macarons to more-ish nougat cake!

Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill painting on the French Riviera Artist Paul Rafferty was inspired to follow in Winston Churchill’s paint brush strokes… In 2015, artist Paul Rafferty began a project to find the locations of Sir Winston Churchill’s painting locations for a book. His focus was the South of France, where he lives, though his discoveries went beyond this region. It became a voyage of discovery which took him to many of the most iconic locations of Provence and the Cote d’Azur and resulted in a gorgeous coffee table book, filled with photos and anecdotes. An artist inspired by an artist Long ago, in 2004, I came across a watercolour in an antique bookshop in Los Angeles. It was signed ‘Winston Churchill’. I took a photograph and sent it

to David Coombs who is the authority on Churchill’s paintings. He informed me it was not by Sir Winston as he never painted in watercolour. Thus began my interest in Churchill’s paintings and a bond with David. I began to locate places where Churchill painted… Finding these locations through a combination of Google Earth, cartes postales anciennes and knowledge of the region turned out to be a huge challenge. It was much more of an undertaking than I had ever imagined. Even before this, I had found myself painting some of Churchill’s locations, though many of the views were not obvious. The painting at Villa Sylvia in Cap Ferrat titled “The Little Harbour, St-Jean-Cap-Ferrat” painted in 1921, is a good example. This pretty little cove lies just below the exquisite Villa Rothschild and I had painted this exact view before, though I had taken in a wider field of view. Churchill chose a more cropped view and focused on the villa. It was the jetty tower with its distinctive gazebo on top that I eventually recognised, one of many Eureka moments. This led me to find another painting of the garden of Villa Sylvia featuring an old pergola. The painting of the magnificent villa Churchill visited with Sir John Lavery was a new discovery, no one knew he’d ever been there.