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Dimensions: 82 by 99cm., 32 1/4 by 39in.
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Provenance: PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE BELGIAN COLLECTION
Acquired by the present owner in France in 1994
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Notes: In 1923, Henri Martin bought a house in the small fishing village of Collioure near the Spanish border. A source of inspiration for Signac nearly twenty years before, Collioure had become associated with the birth of Fauvism, after Derain joined Matisse and his family there during the summer of 1905. As Richard Thomson points out, the attraction of small villages like Collioure and Saint-Tropez 'was their remoteness, their difference from the north in terms of climate and environment, their relative freedom from industrialisation and tourism' (R. Thomson, Monet to Matisse: Landscape Painting in France 1874-1914, Edinburgh, 1994, p. 75).
By the time Martin settled there in the mid-1920s, Collioure had become less cut off and more of a tourist destination, but even so it remained largely unspoilt. The view of the bay with the houses and fort on the far shore tucked under the foothills of the Pyrenees, emphasises the harmony between the town and the surrounding landscape. Even though Martin was too much of an individual to subscribe to the rigorous laws of Neo-Impressionist colour shemes as laid down by Seurat and Signac, he was very much in tune with their demand for a pictorial harmony made up of a carefully modulated palette and rythmic orchestration of line. Many of his paintings of Collioure, of which this is a particularly fine example, show the grace that singled him out as one of the leading painters of his time.
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