Ben Nicholson’s painterly oeuvre oscillates between pure abstraction and the representational, albeit reduced language of his still lifes and landscapes. He used the architectural constructions of his paintings and reliefs composed of rectangles and circles to express a—also “musical”—relationship between form, color, and sound. The painted relief created in December 1965 alludes to the small town of Amboise on the Loire, where Nicholson had worked the previous summer.