FELIX VALOTTON (1865-1925)
Mont Vinaigre (618m - 2,027ft)
France (Provence Alpes Côte d'Azur)
1. In L’Estérel et la baie de Cannes, 1925, oil on canvas
2. In L’Estérel et la baie de Cannes, 1925, oil on canvas (détail)
The mountain
This view of L'Esterel and the Baie de Cannes by FELIX Valloton allows to see a large part of the Massif of the Esterel and its seven summits : Mont Vinaigre (618 m - 2,027 ft), Mont Suvières (558m - 1831ft), Sommet du Marsaou (548m -1,798ft), Pic de l'Ours (492m -1,614ft), Pic du Cap-Roux (453m -1,486ft), the Saint-Pilon (442 m -1,450ft) and the Sommet Pelet (439m -1,440ft).
The Esterel Massif is a low altitude volcanic mountain range of 32,000 hectares located on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. It covers the south-east of the Var, a small part located in the Alpes-Maritimes, France. Separated from the Moors by the valley of the Argens, the relief of the Esterel is shredded and deeply ravined. The massif extends over 320 km2 of which 130 km2 classified and protected. 60 km2 of state forest are maintained by the National Forestry Office.
The Esterel Massif is a low altitude volcanic mountain range of 32,000 hectares located on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. It covers the south-east of the Var, a small part located in the Alpes-Maritimes, France. Separated from the Moors by the valley of the Argens, the relief of the Esterel is shredded and deeply ravined. The massif extends over 320 km2 of which 130 km2 classified and protected. 60 km2 of state forest are maintained by the National Forestry Office.
The heart of the massif is protected by a decree of 1996. In the part of Alpes-Maritimes, a departmental park of 772 ha was created in 1997. It shelters a population of red deer, introduced in 1961. In the Var, a Biological reserve protects nearly 800 hectares. The massif is a site of the Natura 2000 network responsible for the preservation of nature in Europe.
Mount Vinaigre (Mount Vinagar) located in Frejus is the highest peak in the Massif de l' Esterel and was the hideout of robbers. Gaspard de Besse (1757-1781), which robbed travelers and tax agents in the 18th century, sheltered there. Mont Vinaigre was also the refuge of the convicts escaped from the jail in Toulon.Today, Mount Vinaigre is not completely accessible to the public It can be approached by taking the road DN7 between Fréjus and Mandelieu-la-Napoule, 3 km before the crossing with the road D237. There, a paved DFCI trail could allow access to its summit but it ends 1 kilometer after the forest house of Malpey. Only vehicles belonging to the French National Forestry Office or rescue vehicles are allowed to pass this point.
The painter
Félix Edouard Vallotton was a Swiss/French painter and printmaker associated (from 1892) with Les Nabis, a group of young artists that included Pierre Bonnard, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Maurice Denis, and Edouard Vuillard, with whom Vallotton was to form a lifelong friendship. During the 1890s, when Vallotton was closely allied with the avant-garde, his paintings reflected the style of his woodcuts, with flat areas of color, hard edges, and simplification of detail. His subjects included genre scenes, portraits and nudes. Examples of his Nabi style are the deliberately awkward Bathers on a Summer Evening (1892–93), now in the Kunsthaus Zurich, and the symbolist Moonlight (1895), in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
In 1899 Vallotton married Gabrielle Rodrigues-Henriques, a wealthy young widow with three children, and in 1900 he attained French citizenship. Around 1899, his printmaking activity diminished as he concentrated on painting, developing a sober, often bitter realism independently of the artistic mainstream. His Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1907) was painted as an apparent response to Picasso's portrait of the previous year, and in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Stein described the very methodical way in which Vallotton painted it, working from top to bottom as if lowering a curtain across the canvas.
Vallotton's paintings of the post-Nabi period found admirers, and were generally respected for their truthfulness and their technical qualities, but the severity of his style was frequently criticized. Typical is the reaction of the critic who, writing in the March 23, 1910 issue of Neue Zurcher Zeitung, complained that Vallotton "paints like a policeman, like someone whose job it is to catch forms and colors. Everything creaks with an intolerable dryness ... the colors lack all joyfulness."
In its uncompromising character his art prefigured the New Objectivity that flourished in Germany during the 1920s, and has a further parallel in the work of Edward Hopper.
Vallotton responded in 1914 to the coming of the First World War by volunteering for the French army, but he was rejected because of his age. In 1915–16 he returned to the medium of woodcut for the first time since 1901 to express his feelings for his adopted country in the series, This is War, his last prints. He subsequently spent three weeks on a tour of the Champagne front in 1917, on a commission from the Ministry of Fine Arts. The sketches he produced became the basis for a group of paintings, The Church of Souain in Silhouette among them, in which he recorded with cool detachment the ruined landscape. In his last years Félix Vallotton concentrated especially on still lifes and on "composite landscapes", landscapes composed in the studio from memory and imagination. Always a prolific artist, by the end of his life he had completed over 1700 paintings and about 200 prints, in addition to hundreds of drawings and several sculptures. He died on the day after his 60th birthday, following cancer surgery in Paris in 1925.
The painter
Félix Edouard Vallotton was a Swiss/French painter and printmaker associated (from 1892) with Les Nabis, a group of young artists that included Pierre Bonnard, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Maurice Denis, and Edouard Vuillard, with whom Vallotton was to form a lifelong friendship. During the 1890s, when Vallotton was closely allied with the avant-garde, his paintings reflected the style of his woodcuts, with flat areas of color, hard edges, and simplification of detail. His subjects included genre scenes, portraits and nudes. Examples of his Nabi style are the deliberately awkward Bathers on a Summer Evening (1892–93), now in the Kunsthaus Zurich, and the symbolist Moonlight (1895), in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
In 1899 Vallotton married Gabrielle Rodrigues-Henriques, a wealthy young widow with three children, and in 1900 he attained French citizenship. Around 1899, his printmaking activity diminished as he concentrated on painting, developing a sober, often bitter realism independently of the artistic mainstream. His Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1907) was painted as an apparent response to Picasso's portrait of the previous year, and in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Stein described the very methodical way in which Vallotton painted it, working from top to bottom as if lowering a curtain across the canvas.
Vallotton's paintings of the post-Nabi period found admirers, and were generally respected for their truthfulness and their technical qualities, but the severity of his style was frequently criticized. Typical is the reaction of the critic who, writing in the March 23, 1910 issue of Neue Zurcher Zeitung, complained that Vallotton "paints like a policeman, like someone whose job it is to catch forms and colors. Everything creaks with an intolerable dryness ... the colors lack all joyfulness."
In its uncompromising character his art prefigured the New Objectivity that flourished in Germany during the 1920s, and has a further parallel in the work of Edward Hopper.
Vallotton responded in 1914 to the coming of the First World War by volunteering for the French army, but he was rejected because of his age. In 1915–16 he returned to the medium of woodcut for the first time since 1901 to express his feelings for his adopted country in the series, This is War, his last prints. He subsequently spent three weeks on a tour of the Champagne front in 1917, on a commission from the Ministry of Fine Arts. The sketches he produced became the basis for a group of paintings, The Church of Souain in Silhouette among them, in which he recorded with cool detachment the ruined landscape. In his last years Félix Vallotton concentrated especially on still lifes and on "composite landscapes", landscapes composed in the studio from memory and imagination. Always a prolific artist, by the end of his life he had completed over 1700 paintings and about 200 prints, in addition to hundreds of drawings and several sculptures. He died on the day after his 60th birthday, following cancer surgery in Paris in 1925.
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2017 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau
