Bords de la Cagne

Vallotton first discovered the spectral beauty of Provençal Cagnes in the winter of 1920-21 when, for the sake of his health, he and his wife Gabrielle sought refuge from the cold of Paris, lodging in a small pension high in the hills. He became so enamoured of the landscape that he returned to it each year for the rest of his life, eventually buying a small house and a plot of land there in 1924, the year before his death. This locale, its more forgiving climate, its light and its tranquil river provided him with fresh inspiration and stimulated the creation of some of his most peacefully arcadian paintings which yet retain a characteristic sense of otherness.

‘I would like to be able to re-create landscapes only with the help of the emotion they have provoked in me, a few large evocative lines, one or two details chosen with no thought for the exact time or light’ - Felix Vallotton
The present work features the banks of the Cagnes river, upstream from the coast where it reaches the sea between Nice and Antibes. The natural beauty of the inland environment, at the leafless and crisp turn of the year, is laid bare in this work. The unclad skeletal forms of the trees that line both banks are picked out meticulously on the left side of the work while on the right we see a muddy and rutted farm track carved almost sculpturally into the land adjacent to a vineyard. In the right-hand background there stands a capitelle or cazelle, a small dry-stone structure used for agricultural storage or for shelter. The foreground depicts the small biomorphic shapes of grassy hummocks that appear to be drawn undulatingly towards the life-sustaining water.

The painting depicts the harmonious yet contrasting conjunction of unharnessed nature, see the spontaneously entangled branches on the top left, alongside land farmed for our sustenance and pleasure, represented by the regimentation of the vine stakes on the right. These are the dual domains of the rural hinterland, cultivated terrain beside wild provinces that seem to lean in towards each other. But any such compositional formalism is subsumed by the artist’s delight in line, colour and texture. Like some other of Vallotton’s landscapes, this land appears eerily peopleless, but evidence of their toil is apparent in the plantation, the imprint of the cartwheels and in that Cabane en pierre sèche.

Reflections on water, one of Vallotton’s signature motifs, are here captured with a sense of chromatic mystery. Slenderly curving willow stems gleam from the unruffled surface and mirror those that lean on the far bank. From the rust-like raw and burnt sienna on the left, colours which also embellish the shoots of the pollarded tree that juts out over the water, a cerulean blue triangle of the unseen sky appears. It then merges back into the shadowy green depths of the river’s bend.
Bords de la Cagne bears comparison with Ruisseau rouille et galets blancs, held in the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne. Both works were made in the same year and demonstrate a similar fascination with the prismatic colour range of river scenes. Vallée de la Cagne, also painted in 1921, foregrounds the same epicormic tree-growth spouts, accompanied by their perplexingly hard shadows.

Vallotton’s 100-year anniversary happens at the end of December this year, an occasion which will doubtless excite renewed interest in work that still feels strikingly contemporary and enigmatic. He continues to live up to his early nickname, ‘le nabi étranger’. In other words, he remains the outsider, Swiss-born rather than French like his confrères, yet still a member of the Nabis group of artists. His work conjures a sense of strangeness, a detached otherness that remains vividly and timelessly compelling.