Between exhibitions in 1964 and 1965, Douglas travelled through Corsica and Portugal, as well as spending time in the Loire Valley and mountainous, forested Auvergne areas of France - sketching and making painting notes as always. The colours in this painting are of sun-baked landscape, not as vivid and intense as his paintings of the rugged island of Corsica. The scene is southern Portugal, probably the Alentejo region where Douglas stayed a few days en route to the popular Algarve beaches at the bottom end of the country. This was the height of summer; although hot, the region is a fertile area known for its distinctive cork oak trees that are harvested for cork fibre.

In a letter to his parents dated 14 July 1965, Douglas wrote: 'Down in the south among storks wheeling and picking about in brilliant cornfields - obviously looking for babies! - and splendid aridity, in near desert air. My hand and notebooks have been filling well with material for pictures…So many influences from Ionic, Gothic, Islamic, 18th Century French not forgetting the near Chinese tilt to the edges of tiled roofs. I love the way the Portuguese have mixed and digested all these styles but can see no real Portuguese style pure in itself. Am in ideal form in this heavenly place. He had recently been experimenting with a new medium, plastic paint. It spreads easily with water and is almost immediately dry, and once dry completely waterproof, he wrote home. You can imagine what interesting play of superimposition of transparencies is possible - but the paint has to be so quickly used once out of the tube that there's hardly time to think or mix more than one colour at once. Perhaps hardly a fair trial in heat like the last 10 days. It's only now that I begin to see how I can adapt its possibilities to mine.

Douglas described it as exhausting and baffling research… a new medium means beginning at scratch and making awful messes like a student. At last he saw light through the murk and was pleased with the results once he forced the new paint to obey. He talked in letters about finishing a number of paintings for European shows and sending a collection to New Zealand for exhibition. A selection of Portuguese and Corsican paintings were seen in New Zealand at a solo exhibition of 38 works at Te Manawa Art Gallery, Palmerston North in late 1966, and at John Leech Gallery, Auckland in May 1967.

Anna Cahill, MacDiarmid Arts Trust