CAP CANAILLE PAINTED BY HENRI MANGUIN

HENRI MANGUIN  (1874-1949)
Cap Canaille (394 m -1292, 65 ft)

France

 In  Aloés en fleurs, Cassis, oil on panel, 1912, Private owner

The mountain

Cap Canaille (394m) is a cape in France located in the the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region with a culminating point called " La Grande Tête"  (The great Head). It is located near the city of Cassis, north-west of La Ciotat. Its red rock is composed of detritic limestones. Going into the Mediterranean Sea, it consists of rocky and steep banks dominated by the western extremity of the Soubeyranes cliffs. The latter are, after the Slieve League in Ireland, one of the highest maritime cliffs in Europe and constitute, in La Ciotat, the highest cliffs in France with a maximum altitude of 394 meters. A road, the D141 called "Route des Crêtes", connects Cassis to La Ciotat by approaching the edge of the cliff.  Several gazebos are set up there with a spectacular view on the French Riviera and the sea. Cap Canaille is well known for having inspired a lot of painters of the end of 19th century and beginning of 20th. Its name is due to a distortion of the Provençal langage  Cap Naio  "Cap Naille" in French, meaning "Swimming mountain " or a distorsion of the roman latin name Mons Canalis meaning " Mountain  of Aqueducts".

The painter 

The French painter Henri-Charles Manguin although often considered a precursor of  Fauvism in 1905, is not very well konwn. Studying at  Gustave Moreau's studio at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he befriends Albert Marquet, Henri Matisse and Georges Rouault. In 1902, he participated for the first time in the Salon des Independants. In 1904, he discovered the small fishing port of Saint-Tropez in the south of France and got in touch with Paul Signac. He exhibited at the Salon d'Automne, in the United States and at the Venice Biennale. 

Ambroise Vollard buys him 150 paintings.

 In 1924, he participated in the project of the future Annonciade Museum in Saint-Tropez. In 1938, the Druet Gallery closed, his son bought the unsold ones: Manguin destroyed eight paintings, then exhibited all over the world.  In 1942, he rented a workshop in Avignon. Henri Manguin dies in his house of Oustalet in Saint-Tropez on September 25, 1949. The Salon organizes a posthumous retrospective of his works in 1950.

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2018 - Wandering Vertexes...

by Francis Rousseau 

CAP CANAILLE PAINTED BY PAUL SIGNAC

PAUL SIGNAC (1863-1935

Cap Canaille (394 m -1292, 65 ft)

France

The mountain

Cap Canaille (394m) is a cape in France located in the the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region with a culminating point called " La Grande Tête"  (The great Head). It is located in the city of Cassis, north-west of La Ciotat. Its red rock is composed of detritic limestones. Going into the Mediterranean Sea, it consists of rocky and steep banks dominated by the western extremity of the Soubeyranes cliffs. The latter are, after the Slieve League in Ireland, one of the highest maritime cliffs in Europe and constitute, in La Ciotat, the highest cliffs in France with a maximum altitude of 394 meters. A road, the D141 called "Route des Crêtes", connects Cassis to La Ciotat by approaching the edge of the cliff.  Several gazebos are set up there with a spectacular view on the French Riviera and the sea. Cap Canaille is well known for having inspired a lot of painters of the end of 19th century and beginning of 20th. Its name is due to a distortion of the Provençal langage  Cap Naio  "Cap Naille" in French, meaning "Swimming mountain " or a distorsion of the roman latin name Mons Canalis meaning " Mountain  of Aqueducts".

The painter 

Paul Victor Jules Signac was a French Neo-Impressionist painter who, working with Georges Seurat, helped develop the Pointillist style. In 1884 he met Claude Monet and Georges Seurat. He was struck by the systematic working methods of Seurat and by his theory of colors and became Seurat's faithful supporter, friend and heir with his description of Neo-Impressionism and Divisionism method. Under Seurat's influence he abandoned the short brushstrokes of Impressionism to experiment with scientifically juxtaposed small dots of pure color, intended to combine and blend not on the canvas but in the viewer's eye, the defining feature of Pointillism. Many of Signac's paintings are of the French coast. He loved to paint the water. He left the capital each summer, to stay in the south of France in the village of Collioure or at St. Tropez, where he bought a house and invited his friends.

Paul Signac, Albert Dubois-Pillet, Odilon Redon and Georges Seurat were among the founders of the Société des Artistes Indépendants. The association began in Paris 29 July 1884 with the organization of massive exhibitions, with the device "No jury nor awards". "The purpose of Société des Artistes Indépendants—based on the principle of abolishing admission jury—is to allow the artists to present their works to public judgement with complete freedom". For the following three decades their annual exhibitions set the trends in art of the early 20th century.

Signac himself experimented with various media. As well as oil paintings and watercolors he made etchings, lithographs, and many pen-and-ink sketches composed of small, laborious dots. The Neo-Impressionists influenced the next generation: Signac inspired Henri Matisse and André Derain in particular, thus playing a decisive role in the evolution of Fauvism.

As president of the Société des Artistes Indépendants from 1908 until his death, Signac encouraged younger artists (he was the first to buy a painting by Matisse) by exhibiting the controversial works of the Fauves and the Cubists.

CAP CANAILLE PAINTED BY ROGER FRY

Roger Fry (1866-1934)

Cap Canaille (394 m -1292, 65 ft)

France

in  View of Cassis, 1900 

The mountain
Cap Canaille (394m) is a cape in France located in the the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region with a culminating point called " La Grande Tête"  (The great Head). It is located in the city of Cassis, north-west of La Ciotat. Its red rock is composed of detritic limestones. Going into the Mediterranean Sea, it consists of rocky and steep banks dominated by the western extremity of the Soubeyranes cliffs. The latter are, after the Slieve League in Ireland, one of the highest maritime cliffs in Europe and constitute, in La Ciotat, the highest cliffs in France with a maximum altitude of 394 meters. A road, the D141 called "Route des Crêtes", connects Cassis to La Ciotat by approaching the edge of the cliff.  Several gazebos are set up there with a spectacular view on the French Riviera and the sea. Cap Canaille is well known for having inspired a lot of painters of the end of 19th century and beginning of 20th.
Its name is due to a distortion of the Provençal langage  Cap Naio  "Cap Naille" in French, meaning "Swimming mountain " or a distorsion of the roman latin name Mons Canalis meaning " Mountain  of Aqueducts".

The Painter 
Roger Eliot Fry was an English painter and critic, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Establishing his reputation as a scholar of the Old Masters, he became an advocate of more recent developments in French painting, to which he gave the name Post-Impressionism. He was the first figure to raise public awareness of modern art in Britain, and emphasised the formal properties of paintings over the "associated ideas" conjured in the viewer by their representational content. He was described by the art historian Kenneth Clark as "incomparably the greatest influence on taste since Ruskin ... In so far as taste can be changed by one man, it was changed by Roger Fry". The taste Fry influenced was primarily that of the Anglophone world, and his success lay largely in alerting an educated public to a compelling version of recent artistic developments of the Parisian avant-garde.
As a painter Fry was experimental (his work included a few abstracts), but his best pictures were straightforward naturalistic portraits, although he did not pretend to be a professional portrait - painter. In his art he explored his own sensations and gradually his own personal visions and attitudes asserted themselves. His work was considered to give pleasure, 'communicating the delight of unexpected beauty and which tempers the spectator's sense to a keener consciousness of its presence'. Fry did not consider himself a great artist, 'only a serious artist with some sensibility and taste'.