James Dickson Innes first visited Collioure, a seaside town in the French Mediterranean just north of the Spanish border, with his friend John Fothergill in the spring of 1908. At twenty-one, Innes was fresh from three years’ study at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, where a natural affinity with landscape had seemed to compensate for his poor performance at figure drawing. At Collioure, Fothergill recalled, Innes ‘had his fill of heat, light and gaudy local colour, and his all-excelling sense of colour was awakened’.1John Fothergill, James Dickson Innes, Llanelly 1887 – Swanley 1914, Faber & Faber, London, 1946, p. 8. Collioure was to provide the defining moment for Innes’s emerging sense of himself as a landscape artist.
Shortly after the friends’ return to England, Innes was diagnosed with tuberculosis, a disease then curable only by prolonged rest. Innes’s irrepressible wanderlust and restless drive to create, his wanton neglect of his health (he occasionally slept outdoors on his painting expeditions) and his alcoholic excess as the illness progressed made his subsequent work a race against time. In May 1910 he returned to Collioure with his then mistress, Euphemia Lamb, wife of the painter Henry Lamb. Later that year he was sleeping under the stars on the moors of North Wales; he continued painting out of doors in the Welsh mountains, with fellow artist Augustus John in March and May 1911, under whose influence he turned from his preference for watercolours to painting on small boards in oil. The summer of 1911 found him drawn to Collioure again, and seeking to thin out his oil paintings like watercolour, an effect he admirably achieved in Collioure, 1911, along with a heightening of his overall palette. Randolph Schwabe, a fellow student at the Slade, felt that the ‘feverish intensity’ of Innes’s Mediterranean landscapes from this point on owed something to the progression of the artist’s disease.2Randolph Schwabe, ‘Reminiscences of fellow students’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 82, no. 478, Jan. 1943, p. 6.
Innes last worked near Collioure in the winter of 1912, with friend and artist Derwent Lees. Prior to this, in May 1912, he had travelled to Spain with his friend Baron Howard de Walden.3On Thomas ‘Tommy’ Evelyn Scott-Ellis, 8th Baron Howard de Walden, see John Hoole & Margaret Simons, James Dickson Innes 1887–1914, Lund Humphries, London, 2013, p. 127. Here he continued his experiments with translating the luminous transparency of watercolour into the oil medium.4See John Hoole, James Dickson Innes 1887–1914, Southampton Art Gallery, Southampton, 1977, cat. 89, 90. This thinned-out treatment and the manner in which he ‘played with the landscape as if it were a doll’s house’ contributed to what Fothergill felt was a ‘fear of depth’ in Innes’s work that linked it to the ‘primitive’ painters of the Italian pre-Renaissance.5Fothergill, pp. 9, 11. When Innes’s work was exhibited in Melbourne in the Loan Collection of Contemporary British Art in 1935, it was felt to have ‘a feeling for poetical landscape that reaches to Piero della Francesca, from whom his manner derives’. See Lionel Lindsay, ‘The moderns in art. Loan collection examples’, Herald (Melbourne), 8 Jun. 1935. Another critic stressed the influence of Japanese prints upon the formation of Innes’s flattened aesthetic, leading at times to an occasionally unhappy compromise between Eastern and Western approaches to the representation of mass and perspective.6A. H. T., ‘J. D. Innes’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 40, no. 226, Jan. 1922, p. 49. However this may be, it is clear that Innes experienced an epiphany of light and colour at Collioure akin to that which had mesmerised French Fauve artists Henri Matisse and André Derain in the same location a few years earlier.
Ted Gott, Senior Curator, International Art, National Gallery of Victoria
Text adapted from Modern Britain 1900–1960, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2007
