View on the Cote d'Azur, Menton
- Artist: Roger Eliot Fry
- Date: 1916
- Medium: oil on canvas
- Museum: The Courtauld Gallery
- Collection record: The Courtauld Gallery website
Listen to the free audio guide
About this artwork
This is the "View on the Cote d'Azur, Menton" by Roger Eliot Fry. Painted in 1916, it emerged from a moment of escape: in 1915 Fry was staying at Roquebrune, just outside Menton, after witnessing the devastation of the Marne and Meuse. The Mediterranean light became a refuge, a way to leave war behind even as he stayed within Paris the following year.
Fry wrote that after visiting the Quaker relief work his sister Margery was directing, he simply needed to go south and paint. “I find it’s the only thing to do,” he said, and indeed this canvas carries that urgency. The palette is bright, a deliberate choice encouraged by Belgian painter Jan Vanden Eeckhoudt, the painter Simon Bussy, and his wife Dorothy Strachey, all friends of the host family. In a letter to Winifred Gill, Fry admitted that whenever he reached this Mediterranean country, he felt “just right, the right kinds of colours and shapes everywhere.”
Oil on canvas, the work captures the coast’s airy horizon, the crisp azure of the sea, and the gentle rise of the shoreline. It’s a snapshot of solace—an image that speaks to the power of landscape to calm the mind when the world outside rages.
See it in person
View on the Cote d'Azur, Menton hangs in The Courtauld Gallery at Somerset House, London. Point your phone at any artwork there and audioguide.london plays a free audio guide in six languages — no app download needed.
