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Landscape at Cagnes
Chaïm Soutineca. 1922
Dixon Gallery and Gardens
Memphis, United States
Details
- Title: Landscape at Cagnes
- Creator: Chaim Soutine
- Creator Lifespan: 1894 - 1943
- Creator Nationality: Lithuanian
- Creator Gender: Male
- Creator Death Place: Paris, France
- Creator Birth Place: Smilovitch, Belarus
- Date: ca. 1922
- Location: Cagnes, France
- Physical Dimensions: 18 1/4 x 21 7/8 inches
- Description: Chaim Soutine was the tenth of eleven children born into a poor farming family in Lithuania. By 1913, just after his twentieth birthday, he took his meager savings and bought a train ticket to Paris to pursue the life and work of an artist. During his first years in the French capital, Soutine lived in abject poverty in the city’s Montparnasse district, often begging for food at local cafés. During these difficult years, the young artist worked intensely on his craft and found comfort in his friendships with other struggling artists, including the Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani. In 1920, Soutine made the first of many extended visits to Cagnes, a village on the French Mediterranean, where he would return almost annually for the rest of his life. Soutine’s Landscape at Cagnes was painted on one of his early sojourns, and it bears the dream-like quality, the distortion of form, and the swirling, expressionist brushwork that are the hallmarks of his mature style. Soutine’s use of aerial perspective in Landscape at Cagnes accurately describes the region’s mountainous topography, but it also gives the work a disorienting quality and a sense of anxiety that is reinforced by the lone figure in the foreground rushing home to avoid an approaching storm.
- Provenance: Gift of Montgomery H. W. Ritchie
- Type: Oil paintings
- Rights: Dixon Gallery and Gardens. For Terms and Conditions for use of this image please contact the Registrar at 901-761-5250.
- Medium: Oil on canvas
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