Kap Layet

In the summer of 1904 the coast around Saint-Tropez became a kind of laboratory. Cross, who lived nearby at Le Lavandou, was joined along that shore by his friend Paul Signac and by the younger Henri Matisse, and the three painted the Mediterranean light side by side. This view looks down from the coastal path onto a rocky cove ringed with pines. The old neat dots of the pointillists have opened up here into broad, blunt tiles of pure colour, yellow and orange and violet set against each other to make the glare of a southern afternoon. Matisse carried lessons from exactly this summer back north with him. Within a year his own colour would break loose at the Paris salon that gave the Fauves their name.