Charles Camoin French, 1879-1965

When the critic Louis Vauxcelles walked into Room VII of the 1905 Salon d'Automne and christened its painters 'les fauves' (the wild beasts), Charles Camoin was hanging among them. He was twenty-five, Marseille-born and already convinced that colour, not line, was the true subject of painting. Yet of all the artists tarred by that famous insult, Camoin was the one who never let colour break free of the world in front of him. The art historian Bernard Dorival later called him 'the most impressionist of the Fauves', and the phrase has followed him ever since. Born in Marseille on 23 September 1879, Camoin moved to Paris and entered the studio of Gustave Moreau at the École des Beaux-Arts, where he met Matisse, Marquet and Henri Manguin. His friendship with Matisse lasted the rest of both artists' lives and the two travelled and painted together in the South of France on journeys that informed the palette and subject matter of each. Then came the encounter that marked him most. Posted to Aix-en-Provence for military service in the early 1900s, Camoin sought out Paul Cézanne, and the ageing painter took to the young Marseillais, beginning a friendship and correspondence that continued until Cézanne's death. Cézanne's insistence on working directly from nature became the compass of Camoin's career. However bright his palette burned in the Fauve years, and it burned brightest on his painting trips to Corsica in 1906 and 1910, the motif always came first: the tilt of a harbour wall, the exact weight of afternoon light on water. Three years later Camoin took a studio in Saint-Tropez, then still a working fishing port, and for the next four decades divided his year between the Mediterranean and Montmartre. The subjects he returned to again and again, the harbour at Saint-Tropez, the beach at Pampelonne, portraits of women and still lifes, were painted en plein air wherever possible, in loose, feathered strokes that register fleeting conditions of sunlight.