Derain

Pursuing the mystery picture, I took its picture - with it being rather more tricky than I expected to get a snap without reflections - and gave it to google's image search facility (at reference 1), which found the name and number of the original more or less immediately.

Described as '185 - Kunsthaus Zürich (CH) - André DERAIN, 1850 - 1954 - Vue de Martigues, 1908 by Lumière-du-matin', with the first bit being the owning gallery, the penultimate bit being the name of the picture and the ultimate bit being the name of the photographer who took the picture. At least, so I suppose.

However, google failed to find a proper art reproduction of the picture and the owning gallery don't seem to offer anything of that sort, so I use this one from http://www.flickriver.com/, a site not previously heard of. Along the way I signed up for another image site I had not previously heard of called https://uk.pinterest.com/.

Without the search facility, I am not sure how I would have found this painting, having barely heard of Derain. I now suspect that our reproduction had originally been bought, at a time when the painting had not long been painted, by my father's eldest sister.

So much for my extensive knowledge of matters arty.

PS: next day: I have now had a play with Pinterest, which is very good at recovering nice images of paintings. But I have to work out what it is offering that google is not. Perhaps wikipedia will advise.

Reference 1: https://images.google.com/ and click on the camera to get the reverse image service.

Group search key: tca.