Louis Pastour was the painter of Cannes. Born there on 26 June 1876 and dying there in December 1948, he spent his whole life on the stretch of coast between the Suquet and the bay and painted it with a devotion that earned him the Provençal nickname Lou Pintre dòu Soulèu (the painter of the sun). His beginnings could hardly have been harder. Family circumstances forced him to work from the age of thirteen as a house painter and from 1894 he studied at evening classes at the École Nationale des Arts Décoratifs while labouring by day. That double life shaped everything that followed. In 1902 he founded the Association des Beaux-Arts de Cannes with a group of fellow workers who shared his passion for art, creating an annual salon for the painters of the region and later opening an artists' colour shop in the town, À la Palette de Rubens, which became a meeting place for the artistic life of the coast. As a painter Pastour belongs to Post-Impressionism through a technique entirely his own: he painted with the knife, building his marines, flower pieces and Provençal landscapes from thick strokes of pure colour. Light was his lifelong subject, the glare of the Midi sun on the bay of Cannes, on sails, markets and the old town. Recognition came late, his first exhibition arriving only at the age of forty five, but it came fully: in 1938 he was among the first painters sold by the young Galerie Maeght in Cannes and in the 1940s he exhibited alongside Jean-Gabriel Domergue and Henri Lebasque in exhibitions organised by his friends Marguerite and Aimé Maeght. His works are held in public collections including the Musée d'Orsay and the Musée de la Castre in Cannes.