After the war, Camoin went through tough times. In 1920, he married Charlotte Prost (also known as Lola) who came from Provence, like him, and shared his life between Montmartre and Saint-Tropez. He got closer to the Provençal painters Louis-Mathieu Verdilhan, Alfred Lombard and Louis Audibert, whom he had met in 1913. The pre-war years of worry and success gave way to a period of stability marked by a search for balance, occasional submissions to big Parisian salons, and regular exhibitions organised by his dealers Charles Vildrac and Marcel Bernheim.
The discovery of the late work of Auguste Renoir, whom he visited with Matisse in 1918, freed him from Cézanne’s rigour. Captivated by Renoir’s freedom of touch and colour, Camoin applied the fluid and bright manner he had developed in Tangier to compositions dominated by a sensual, hedonistic approach.
He gave prominence to female nudes, developed a new interest in still-life and flowers, and dedicated himself to portraiture. The many child portraits he made attest to the commissions he received from private collectors and echo the birth of his daughter Anne-Marie (known as Annie) in 1933, which resulted in mother and child paintings filled with tenderness. Domestic and intimate life opened new perspectives, redolent of Pierre Bonnard’s contemporary research.
However, landscape remained his core interest, with many series mainly based on Southern motifs: the harbours of Marseille or of the Var coast; Cannes and the Croisette; Saint-Tropez, its port, its beaches and its hinterland, Sainte-Anne and Ramatuelle in particular; or the banks of the Seine, the mills in Montmartre or the Breton coasts.
Whether he painted nudes, flowers or landscapes, Camoin sought to reconcile the coloured sensations produced by these motifs and the construction of the painting through a reflexive process. Forms emerged on the canvas from colour and pictorial matter. Their organising principles depended as much on the whole as on the different parts of the composition and their interactions. Such a system allowed Camoin to create a coloured harmony that conveyed his sensory experience: ‘I am not representing an object, flowers, a woman, or trees; instead I am creating a coloured harmony.’ (Camoin)
This approach pertained to the plastic expressiveness which laid the foundations of modern art. The subtlety of Camoin’s art lied in the fact that while expression was integral to his compositions, it always derived from contact with nature in a quest for Truth that he carried out as closely to reality as possible, and beyond dogmatism, giving rise to lyrical realism.
