Roland Oudot, Basque Landscape, 1927

Roland Oudot (1897-1981)
Basque landscape, 1927
Oil on canvas
Signed and dated lower right
80 x 100 cm
Provenance: Coll. Chester Dale (1883-1962)
Exhibition: National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1937

Chester Dale is an American banker and art collector who made his fortune on the stock market, allowing him to become a major collector of 19th and 20th century French paintings. The main works from his collection were donated to the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1941, as well as by bequest in 1963.

In 1910, Dale married Maud Murray, a painter and art critic who encouraged him to collect the art of his time. When the National Gallery of Art opened in 1937, Dale loaned twenty-two American paintings and two rooms of French impressionist paintings. Four years later, he donated another group of works to the museum. Upon his bequest in 1963, Dale gave the National Gallery a collection of works by major artists such as Paul Cézanne, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Salvador Dalí, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, as well as such as Both Members of This Club by George Bellows, Portrait of Louis Guillaume by Paul Cézanne and La Famille des Saltimbanques by Pablo Picasso. The entire legacy included more than two hundred paintings, seven sculptures, twenty-two prints, more than a thousand sales catalogs and more than a thousand books.