Field Notes
We came for the light, which is the only honest reason to come to Collioure. It sits on the last stretch of French coast before Spain, where the Pyrenees walk down into the sea and the water turns the deep red that gave this shore its name, the Cote Vermeille. The town is small. You can cross it in ten minutes. Yet few small places have asked so much of the people who tried to paint them.
In the summer of 1905 Henri Matisse arrived, and Andre Derain followed. They set up on the quay and let the colour off its leash, painting the harbour in reds and oranges that no one had dared use for shadow. That autumn their canvases hung at the Salon d'Automne in Paris, and a startled critic reached for the word fauves, wild beasts. The name stuck. Modern painting has a birthday, and it falls here, on this water.
A town you can cross in ten minutes taught the twentieth century how to see.
The harbour they painted still holds its shape. On one side stands the Chateau Royal, founded by the Knights Templar in 1207, later the court of the Kings of Majorca, and held by Spain until 1642. On the other rises the bell tower of Notre-Dame-des-Anges, a squat pink-domed cylinder that began life as a medieval lighthouse, warning ships off the rocks with smoke by day and fire by night before a church was raised against it in the 1680s. Between the two, the beach fills with striped umbrellas and the wooden boats Matisse would still recognise.
What Collioure sells now, beyond the light, is the anchovy. This coast has salted fish since at least 1397, and the trade once mattered enough that a French king let the town off the hated salt tax. Two houses still cure by hand, packing the small silver fish in coarse salt for anywhere from fifteen to twenty-four days until they soften into something sweet and deep. Since 2004 the Collioure anchovy has carried a European protected name, the only fish in France to hold one. You eat them on toast, with a little butter, looking at the sea that grew them.
Come out of season if you can. In August the cove is loud and the terraces are full. In October the light runs longer and lower, that fauve light, and you begin to understand what those two men saw when they refused to paint it grey.
