CAP CANAILLE PAINTED BY ROGER FRY

Roger Fry (1866-1934)

Cap Canaille (394 m -1292, 65 ft)

France

in  View of Cassis, 1900 

The mountain
Cap Canaille (394m) is a cape in France located in the the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region with a culminating point called " La Grande Tête"  (The great Head). It is located in the city of Cassis, north-west of La Ciotat. Its red rock is composed of detritic limestones. Going into the Mediterranean Sea, it consists of rocky and steep banks dominated by the western extremity of the Soubeyranes cliffs. The latter are, after the Slieve League in Ireland, one of the highest maritime cliffs in Europe and constitute, in La Ciotat, the highest cliffs in France with a maximum altitude of 394 meters. A road, the D141 called "Route des Crêtes", connects Cassis to La Ciotat by approaching the edge of the cliff.  Several gazebos are set up there with a spectacular view on the French Riviera and the sea. Cap Canaille is well known for having inspired a lot of painters of the end of 19th century and beginning of 20th.
Its name is due to a distortion of the Provençal langage  Cap Naio  "Cap Naille" in French, meaning "Swimming mountain " or a distorsion of the roman latin name Mons Canalis meaning " Mountain  of Aqueducts".

The Painter 
Roger Eliot Fry was an English painter and critic, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Establishing his reputation as a scholar of the Old Masters, he became an advocate of more recent developments in French painting, to which he gave the name Post-Impressionism. He was the first figure to raise public awareness of modern art in Britain, and emphasised the formal properties of paintings over the "associated ideas" conjured in the viewer by their representational content. He was described by the art historian Kenneth Clark as "incomparably the greatest influence on taste since Ruskin ... In so far as taste can be changed by one man, it was changed by Roger Fry". The taste Fry influenced was primarily that of the Anglophone world, and his success lay largely in alerting an educated public to a compelling version of recent artistic developments of the Parisian avant-garde.
As a painter Fry was experimental (his work included a few abstracts), but his best pictures were straightforward naturalistic portraits, although he did not pretend to be a professional portrait - painter. In his art he explored his own sensations and gradually his own personal visions and attitudes asserted themselves. His work was considered to give pleasure, 'communicating the delight of unexpected beauty and which tempers the spectator's sense to a keener consciousness of its presence'. Fry did not consider himself a great artist, 'only a serious artist with some sensibility and taste'.