In the early 1990s, Fred Yates settled in France, first at a mill house near Beaumes-de-Venise and later in the village of Rancon in Haute-Vienne. There he continued to paint with the exuberance and freedom that had become his hallmark, capturing the rhythms of local life and landscape in increasingly bold and expressive ways. France offered Yates not only warmer weather than Manchester or even Cornwall, but also communities whose openness and acceptance suited both his temperament and his art.

Yates rarely remained in one place for long. From Rancon he moved through Sablet in Provence and Nyons before finally settling in the mountain village of La Motte in the Rhône-Alpes. During this French period he produced some of his most adventurous paintings, often applying paint with remarkable physicality, using sticks, palette knives and sometimes even his hands, building rich surfaces of extraordinary energy and texture.

Ascending the Gardens is a striking example of this late style. Gardens had long fascinated Yates, both in Cornwall and later in France, providing ideal subject matter for an artist whose work celebrated colour, movement and human connection. Here, figures ascend a winding, serpentine path through a landscape that seems to pulse with floral life rising to the trees atop the gardens, blue mountains and a gorgeous playful sky beyond. The painting captures not simply a place but an atmosphere: communal, fun and animated by Yates’s unmistakable sense of humour. 

An anecdote from this period reflects both Yates’s working methods and his appetite for paint. It was said that on arriving in a new French town or village he would locate the local art supplier and buy their entire stock of oil paint. By this stage in his career, growing recognition had afforded him the freedom to work on larger stretched canvases and to paint with a generousity and abandon that became central to his late work.

Recognition of Yates’s achievement culminated in the major retrospective held at Penlee House Gallery in 2022-23, marking the centenary of his birth. Today, his paintings are represented in numerous public collections, including Brighton and Hove Art Gallery, Liverpool University, the University of Warwick, Torquay Art Gallery and the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum in Bournemouth.

Fred Yates’s paintings remain vivid celebrations of everyday life. To the end of his career he retained a sharp eye for human relationships and an enduring delight in the places and people that surrounded him.