The Village

Late in 1923 Soutine wrote from Cagnes, on the Riviera, to his Paris dealer Léopold Zborowski that he wanted to leave, that he could no longer bear the landscape. That year and the next he kept going back to one place, La Gaude, a hill village about eight kilometres from Cagnes, where houses and a mill sit on a rocky peak at different heights. This canvas is one of nine he painted there. The houses tilt, the trees twist, and the road seems to fold into the walls, so it is hard to tell where anything stands. The Musée de l'Orangerie calls it the most radical of his landscapes. It passed from the dealer Paul Guillaume to his widow, Domenica, and the French state bought it from her in 1963.