InSight recalls Roger Fry’s trip to the French Riviera in the summer of 1915.
InSight No. 199
Roger Fry, A Mountain Village, 1915
Almost every stop on the railway line along the Cote d’Azur between Menton and St Raphaël is a famous paradise. Each one is lapped by the clear blue waters of the Mediterranean: Monaco, Nice, Cagnes, Antibes, Juan-les-Pins, Cannes. Until its closure after the Second World War, an extension of the railway once continued along the coast beyond Saint Raphaël to Toulon and included a branch line that led to St Tropez. In the summer of 1915, Roger Fry (1866–1934) went to stay with his friends Simon and Dorothy Bussy at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin — the promontory that separates Menton and Monaco — and then took the train to St Tropez where he saw the widow of his friend Henri Doucet, who was killed at Ypres earlier in the year. During his trip he painted with the freshness and zeal of a convert, and his pictures from that summer show Fry gripped by a style he famously characterised as ‘Post Impressionism’.
At the time of Manet and the Post-Impressionists, which he organised at the Grafton Galleries in 1910, Fry was not yet himself painting like a Post-Impressionist. The change came suddenly and did not persist, and the conclusion of his Post-Impressionist experiments roughly coincided with the end of the First World War as he developed a quiet form of neo-classicism, which he pursued for the rest of his life.
In 1911 and 1912, even as he continued to make delicately naturalistic paintings of a kind welcomed by the New English Art Club, he made others that exaggerate colour, eliminate mid-tones and delineate forms so they became flat and solid. In River with Poplars (1912, Tate), hills, trees, clouds and water alike became sturdy and substantial. Between 1912 and 1919 or so, Fry was striving to digest the example of Gauguin and Van Gogh, Derain and Matisse.
The summer of 1915 was especially significant in Fry’s period of Post-Impressionist experiment. Notwithstanding the shadow of war, salutary circumstances influenced his working holiday on the Riviera. Not least of these was the warm southern sunshine, in which element Fry felt more at home than in his native England. Simon Bussy’s wife Dorothy was a Strachey, and Fry’s stop at Roquebrune coincided with that of Dorothy’s sister Philippa (or Pippa). Writing from the train as he departed on 15 June, Fry told Pippa he was sad to leave ‘just that piece of life which somehow I managed to shut off from all the rest and which was in its way so complete and so infinitely more tolerable than anything I’ve known for a long time’. From this, Fry’s biographer Frances Spalding has supposed them to have shared that summer an amitié amoureuse — a chaste but romantic friendship.
Another impetus for Fry’s painterly adventures on the Riviera was the Belgian artist Jean Vanden Eeckhoudt, who was the Bussys’ neighbour and whose daughter Zoum sat for a portrait by Fry. It is typical of Roger Fry as a painter that he should paint in the same sojourn two pictures handled as differently as Boats in a Harbour and A Mountain Village. The former is placid with smooth, flat paintwork; swelling, rounded forms (the foreshortened bow of a boat, the curve of the hills); and sweet, sharply contrasted hues of turquoise, vermilion and lilac. A Mountain Village, which may depict the medieval commune of Gassin near Ste Maxime, is painted in a mesh of broken brushstrokes. The palette is ripe with terre verte, alizarin and red earth, all in a clean but lowered key, and the mesh is loose enough to allow primed white canvas to grin through between touches.
After he returned to England, in November 1915 Fry held a solo exhibition at the Alpine Club Gallery. It included 54 paintings, many of them made in the south of France that summer or perhaps, in some cases, finished upon his return. Boats in a Harbour exists in both large and small versions (the latter of which belonged to Virginia Woolf), and the smaller was likely made from life as an aide memoire for studio work. Picture titles in the exhibition referenced Cassis, Castillione, Èze, Marseilles, Monte Carlo, Ste Agnès, Ste Maxime, St Raphaël and St Tropez. A Mountain Village (no. 48) was bought by another of the Strachey siblings, Pernel, who was Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, between 1927 and 1941. Pippa too owned some of Fry’s paintings from that memorable summer: a painting called Alpes Maritimes and a watercolour of Roquebrune, Alpes Maritimes, which she loaned to the Arts Council’s posthumous exhibition of Fry’s art in 1952.
His Post-Impressionist years were the most inventive in Fry’s life as a painter. He succeeded with still life — an exhibition of his flower paintings was held at the Carfax Gallery in 1917 — and, as his Riviera holiday of 1915 suggests, some of his best work was made plein air from landscape motifs. In the other part of his life, Fry won a formidable and enduring reputation as a tastemaker: his articles, books, lectures and the exhibitions he organised had a profound effect on the aesthetic values of the twentieth century. Yet his work was the product of an ardent, professional and single-minded painter, and his paintings alone warrant Fry’s canonisation among the advanced English artists of his time.
Images:
The commune of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin
Roger Fry, Brusen, Bulgaria, 1911, oil on board, 15.4 x 34.3 cm, Leeds Art Gallery
Roger Fry, River with Poplars, c. 1912, oil on wood, 56.5 x 70.8 cm, Tate
Pippa Strachey, 1915, photographed by an unknown photographer, National Portrait Gallery, London
Jean Vanden Eeckhoudt, Rayon de Soleil sûr le Cap Martin, 1920, oil on canvas, 107 x 87 cm, Private Collection
Roger Fry, Boats in a Harbour, 1915, oil on canvas, 71.5 x 91 cm, The Hepworth Wakefield
Roger Fry, The Quay, St Tropez, 1915, oil on paper laid on panel, 62.3 x 47 cm, Private Collection
Roger Fry, A Mountain Village (detail)
