Best known as a film director, but also a boxer, art lover, writer, horsetrainer, big-game hunter and actor, John Huston (1906-1987) was a talented painter from an early age. His dedication: “In celebration of my beloved friend Baron Philippe’s sixtieth harvest at Mouton”, bears witness both to his affection for the man and his attachment to a place that clearly enchanted him.

His watercolour for the Mouton Rothschild 1982 label is one of the last pictures he ever painted. Sensual, graceful, using deep, warm colours, it returns in representational style to the symbolic theme of the Ram, leaping in dionysiac joy, accompanied by its inseparable companions, the sun and the vine.