Provenance:
Jack Shadbolt Retrospective, The Glenbow Museum, November 2, 1991 – January 5, 1992, cat no. 52

Signed dated lower right

In September 1956, Shadbolt travelled to "Cézanne country," seeking stimulation from the same Mediterranean colours as Matisse, Bonnard, and Cézanne. The Shadbolts found a house in Menton, France, a small Mediterranean town, where light, colour, warmth, and new sensations provided exhilarating personal transformation. This awoke in the artist a hedonism that could only do him good.

 A year or so after the Shadbolts returned to Vancouver from their year abroad, in his own words, Shadbolt began to "fuse the new impacts of colour, light surface and image-motifs with my former preoccupations here - the dark rituals of the cycle of growth, flowering and dying of natural forms, and their evocation in inks, watercolour and gouache from liquid fires, earth colours, flashing lights and darks and the seething underrhythms which express the blind pervasions of growth energy. An animate nature, suggesting anthropomorphic overtones - a far cry from the static geometry of ancient ruins." 

His revitalization is exemplified in "Palmetto Stumps."

Source:
Watson, Scott. Jack Shadbolt, Vancouver/Toronto, Canada, Douglas & McIntyre,1990, pp. 82.