Charles CAMOIN (Marseille 1879 - Paris 1965) View of the Bay of Saint Tropez Oil on cardboard 17 x 26.5 cm à vue Signed lower left Ch. Camoin "Camoin painted more than three hundred pictures of Saint-Tropez and its surroundings. The port, Place des Lices, Plage des Canoubiers, Petite Afrique, La Ponche, etc., are all prominent sites in Saint-Tropez. Bucolic scenes of the hinterland illustrating olive or almond picking, the grape harvest, or depictions of his happy family (picnics, rest) provided him with the bulk of his subjects. The mature works gain in spontaneity, associated with a rich material, sometimes fluid but always colorful and luminous. They contain the influence of Renoir, from which the painter's Parisian output would not escape. Camoin asserted his taste for sensual, voluptuous and spontaneous painting, qualities that he lacked and that Renoir had criticized him for. Shortly after his meeting with the old Impressionist, he wrote to his friend Audibert: "I understand very well what Renoir said about me. (My studies) have a freshness of impression and a spontaneity that one always loses in more advanced works, but which must be replaced by a fullness, a greater solidity of construction. (...) Renoir is right, you have to dare. (...) Working without respite, he writes to Matisse: "I've just spent a period of very regular work, but rather tiring, climbing morning and evening with my backpack across the fields, and I had the impression that I was just beginning to take an interest in the landscape, where I was discovering things I hadn't seen for years that I've been here". Véronique Serrano, Camoin Revival. Les jours heureux, in Camoin dans sa lumière, Musée Granet Aix en Provence, 2016