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The communities of Cagnes-sur-Mer and the more historic village of Haut-de-Cagnes are on the artistic map of the Côte d’Azure principally because of the association with Pierre-Auguste Renoir. However, other painters had been active in the area long before he settled at Domaine des Collettes and thereafter his presence would prove to be a magnet for many, many more.
Émile Auguste Wéry (1868–1935) was born in Reims in 1868. He exhibited with the Salon des Artistes Français, the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts and the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs. Among many prizes, Wéry won a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle of 1900. As a young man in Paris he was a friend of Henri Matisse and spent some time with him on a painting expedition to Brittany in 1896. Wéry moved to Cagnes in 1905 and restored a house in the old town which he named Maison Rouge where he lived until 1930.
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As early as the 1840’s the well-regarded artist Félix Ziem (1821–1911) had visited the region as part of his restless travelling in search of suitable subjects. He was born in Beaune and after some training as an artist in Dijon he moved to Marseille where he found some success. In 1842 he settled in Nice and it was from there that he discovered the delights of the area which provided endless opportunities to satisfy the growing market for landscape paintings. He went on to become a pillar of the art establishment and was a regular exhibitor at the Paris Salon. He continued to travel widely in Europe, the Near East and North Africa and spent some time in Martigues, near Marseille. More information can be found about him in the entry for that town elsewhere on this site. The painting shown is Paysage des environs de Cagnes, 1845/6 (Private collection).
François Antoine Léon Fleury (1804–1858) was born in Paris, the son of an establishment painter, under whom he first studied. He went on to become a successful landscape artist travelling widely around Europe. The painting shown is Vue du Village de Cagnes, 1845 (Musée du Louvre, Paris). 
Ferdinand Deconchy (1859–1946) was a local man who qualified as an architect but his abiding passion was painting his beloved town of Cagnes and environs. Later in life he was mayor of the town between 1912 and 1919 and was a close friend of Renoir. Indeed it was Deconchy who suggested that Domaine des Collettes would make a suitable home for the artist. Several of his paintings are now housed in the Musée Renoir and he is also represented in the collection of the Château-Musée Grimaldi. The painting shown is Cagnes, Le Coté Ouest, Vue de l’Hubac, 1898 (Musée Renoir).
Henri-Edmond Cross (1856–1910) is a post-impressionist artist who’s life and career have been explored elsewhere on this site (see New Impressionists, Le Lavandou/St-Clair, Saint-Tropez, Antibes). He moved to the Côte d’Azur in 1891 hoping that the climate would be beneficial for his chronic rheumatism. He travelled and painted extensively in the region, often in the company of his friend Paul Signac. The watercolour shown is Cyprès à Cagnes (Musée du Louvre, département des Arts graphiques, Paris) which was painted in 1908, probably in preparation for the work in oil, of the same name, which features later in this survey.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), one of the giants of the Impressionist movement, shared hard times and rejection with Monet early in his career. Success was slow in coming but by the 1880’s his fortunes were on the rise and he set of on travels around Europe and North Africa. It was while visiting Paul Cézanne in L’Éstaque in 1882 (see entry elsewhere on this site) that Renoir introduced to the lure of the south and the following year he was in the company of Monet on the Riviera. When Cézanne finally abandoned Paris and returned to his family home in Aix-en-Provence and Monet was dividing his time between Giverny and the south, Renoir had less reason to remain in the capital. He was also beginning to suffer from arthritis in his hands and he thought the warmer climate would be beneficial and so he started to spend more time in Provence. In 1907 he finally purchased a farm at Cagnes called Domaine Les Collettes and had a purpose-built house and studio constructed. Set amidst ancient olive trees and with stunning views of the old town of Cagnes and the coast to Cap d’Antibes and beyond, this was where he spent his remaining years. Although his arthritis became much worse, to the extent that he was confined to a wheelchair and barely able to hold a paintbrush, he continued to work and his door was ever-open to fellow-artists of all ages. The painting shown is Terrasses à Cagnes, 1905 (Private collection).
A friend and protégé of Renoir was Georges d’Espagnat (1870–1950) who went on to become a well-regarded painter in the Impressionist and Post-impressionist style. He exhibited with many names that have become much more famous than his such as Bonnard, Cézanne, Signac, Bonnard, Matisse and Picasso. Examples of his work are in important collections around the world including the painting shown, Vue de Cagnes, 1912 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). 
Belgian painter Georges-Émile Lebacq (1876–1950) was initially self-taught but after World War I he studied in Paris and thereafter lived and worked mainly in France. He was a versatile artist much influenced by the Impressionists and Post-impressionists. The painting shown is Cagnes-sur-Mer, 1910 (Private collection).
The South of France proved to be hothouse of artistic experimentation in the early years of the twentieth century and one of the leading figures in the Fauve movement was André Derain (1880–1954) who visited the town in 1910. His work and that of Henri Matisse is explored in some depth in the entry for Collioure elsewhere on this site. The painting shown is Maison de la poste à Cagnes, 1910 (Private collection).
By then the short-lived ‘ism’ had passed it’s peak but
the ideas generated by the use of non-representational colour would
continue to have an influence on his work and on that of his fellow
Fauve Henri Matisse (1869–1954). Matisse was a frequent
visitor at Les Collettes and the work and thoughts of Renoir were
undoubtedly a great influence. The paintings shown are Maison de la poste à Cagnes, 1910 by Derain (Private collection) and Paysage à Cagnes-sur-Mer, 1918 by Matisse (Private collection).
Felix Vallotton (1865–1925) was born in Switzerland but later adopted French citizenship. He attended the Académie Julien in Paris and spent many hours studying in the Louvre with an emphasis on classical portraiture. Early in his career he developed the woodcut as his principal medium, much influenced by ‘Japonism’ which was so in vogue at the end of the nineteenth century and this fostered the use of flat areas of colour in his painted works, a quality that would be apparent in much of his later work. He became affiliated with ‘Les Nabis’ and formed lasting friendships with the likes of Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis and Édouard Vuillard. In his paintings he developed a rather severe, realistic style and these sombre qualities were deepened during World War I when he spent some time at the front on a commission from the Ministry of Fine Art. After the war he concentrated on still life and landscape, the latter usually being composed in the studio from memory and imagination. This approach has sometimes been referred to as Magic Realism (see the work of Edward Wadsworth in the Marseille entry). The painting shown is Paysage à Cagnes, 1923 (Private collection).
Sir Matthew Smith (1879–1959) was an English painter trained at Manchester School of Art and then the Slade between 1905–07 at a time when it was at its most influential. He then went to Pont-Aven in Britanny and then Paris where he studied under Henri Matisse. Completely absorbed by the art scene where he was exposed to radical ideas and rubbed shoulders with innovative young painters, Smith stayed in France until the outbreak of war in 1914. He returned to England where he enlisted in the army and served on the Western Front. Most of the inter-war years were spent in France where he divided his time between Paris and Aix-en-Provence. His work at this time reflects the influence of the Fauves with its use of bold unnaturalistic colour and the painting shown is Landscape near Cagnes, 1935 (Hussey Bequest, Chichester District Council). His physical and mental health were always fragile but a new relationship with the artist Vera Cunningham seemed to give him a new lease of life. He was knighted in 1954.
While wandering around the streets of the old town you may well come across a plaque indicating the house where Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920) stayed for a while in 1918. Of Italian Jewish origin this controversial artist spent most of his short life in France and he is best known for his idiosyncratic portraits and female nudes. His ‘bohemian’ behaviour with frequent affairs, heavy drinking and drug-taking made him one of the more notorious figures on the Paris art scene. Towards the end of the First World War he travelled south to Nice and Haut-de-Cagnes where, unusually, he produced a series of landscape paintings. The one shown is Paysage de Cagnes, 1919 (Private collection). Tragically, he died the following year of tubercular meningitis at the age of 35
In wartime Paris Modigliano befriended Chaïm Soutine (1893–1943) who was a Russian painter of Jewish origin from Belarus. Soutine was the epitome of the struggling artist - penniless for much of the time and living an almost itinerant lifestyle. He was inspired by painters such as Rembrandt, Chardin and Courbet but developed a unique style more concerned with shape, colour and texture and his work is often seen as a link with Abstract Expressionism. When the prominent American collector, Albert C. Barnes, bought 60 of his paintings on the spot, the artist left the Paris gallery and hailed a taxi to take him to Nice. That was in 1923 and later that year he was to be found in Haut-de-Cagnes producing some of his most important work. As Jackie Wullschlager (Art correspondant for the Financial Times) has commented, ‘Houses, trees, the earth itself, seem to churn and spin in Chaim Soutine’s vehement, surging “Paysage de Cagnes” and “Rue de Cagnes-sur-Mer” – the legacy of Van Gogh’s anguished dynamism crossed with Cézanne’s compression of forms.’ During World War II Soutine was constantly moving from place to place, trying to avoid arrest by the Germans. He died in 1943 from a perforated ulcer. The painting shown is Rue à Cagnes (La Gaude), 1923 (Private collection).
Accompanying Modigliani and Soutine on the trip to Cagnes in 1918 was Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita (1886–1968) and a plaque is also to be found on the house where he stayed. The adventure ended in financial disaster when money ran out and all their baggage was confiscated to settle their debts. He was born and educated in Japan but moved to Paris where he met and became friends with many on avant-garde art scene. Apart from Modigliani and Soutine, Matisse, Picasso and Fernand Léger were among his associates. He his most well-known for his paintings of cats and portraits of beautiful women which display a unique fusion between traditional Japanese ink techniques and Western painting style. He was one of the many notable artists who painted Suzy Solidor (shown here) and this work is now in the Château-Musée Grimaldi.
Soutine’s turbulent vision of the world around him must have been an influence on William Henry Johnson (1901–1970), an Africa-American painter who spent some time in Cagnes in the late 1920’s. He was born in South Carolina and later studied art in New York and at the Cape Cod School of Art in Provincetown, Massachusetts where he was the protégé of Charles Hawthorne. In 1927, with Hawthorne’s assistance, he travelled to Paris to further his studies and then on to the South of France where he met his future wife and had a taste of life relatively free of prejudice and discrimination, defined by his talent rather than the colour of his skin. Johnson returned to the States in 1929 but was back in Europe in 1930 when he married Holcha Krake, a Danish textile artist. They spent the next few years in Scandanavia but chose to move to the United States in 1938 as a result of increasing Nazi sentiments. His later work was much concerned with African-American culture, characterised by a folk-art simplicity and vibrant use of colour. His life was progressivley taken over by tragedy and mental illness and the last two decades were spent hospitalised during which time he ceased to paint completely. The painting shown is Cagnes-sur-Mer, 1928–29 (Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington).
For over a hundred years Cagnes has proved to be a magnet for artists from many parts of the world and another example is Anne Redpath (1895–1965). She was born in Scotland and trained at the Edinburgh School of Art, after which a scholarship allowed her to travel on the Continent. She married in 1920 and lived in Northern France but moved to the South in 1924 where the family lived until 1934 when they returned to Scotland. She and her contemporaries are sometimes referred to as the Edinburgh School, much influenced by the Scottish Colourists and she was obviously influenced by the work of Matisse and others whom she met while in the South of France, leading to a style all her own. The painting shown is Cagnes-sur-Mer, 1930 (Private collection).
Sayed Haider (S.H.) Raza (1922–2016) was an Indian artist who settled in France in the early 1950s but whose work always drew upon the cultural traditions of the sub-continent and was characterised by the richness of colour and texture. He remained in France until the 1970s and although he was initially fascinated by landscape his work became more abstract, incorporating elements of Indian scripture and other cultural references. The image shown is Haut de Cagnes painted in 1951 (The Darashaw Collection).
