Farmhouse in the Pyrenees

Rab Butler and his first wife Sydney Courtauld met de Maistre while on their honeymoon in Australia in 1927. De Maistre took up with them on arrival in England in 1930 and the Butler-Courtauld families became his most important patrons, with Sydney financing his studio home at 13 Ecclestone Street, where de Maistre lived from 1937. He travelled to the continent with Sydney and Rab regularly in the 1930s, and often stayed in the Basque port of St Jean de Luz in south western France, where his cousin Camilla Keogh and his friends the Lengs had properties.