Ansicht von Cagnes

Soutine spent 1923 to 1925 in Cagnes, a hill village above the coast just east of Nice, and he could not stand the place. In a letter from his first year there he wrote that he wanted to leave, that this was a landscape he could not endure, and that he had rubbed out the canvases he had begun. He stayed and kept painting it anyway. The houses and the road lean and buckle as though the hillside were sliding, worked in blues, greens and ochres laid on thick and fast. Another painter had come to Cagnes looking for the opposite thing. Renoir, his hands deformed by arthritis, had bought a farmhouse among the village's old olive trees for the mild air, and he died there in 1919, four years before Soutine arrived.