1928 - 1991

The Tropezien

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"To adonise" is an ancient verb which means to beautify someone.The magic wand 'adonises' the kitchen drudge into a princess and the painter's brush transforms a pot-bellied creature into an Adonis. Vincent Roux managed to adonise the fat admiral, the Bailli of Suffren whose bronze statue (on the harbour front in front of the "Sube") is the symbol of Saint Tropez. His poster transformed the lumbering figure into a 'petit prince'. It was through rose-tinted sunglasses that our hero, a painter of colours that delight the eye, observed the "city of the Bailli" his whole life long, as well as those who lived there or just passed through. From his youth, he would visit Saint Tropez regularly for the occasional long weekend. The only time when he ceased to visit was when he was actually living there, roughly speaking from 1965 to 1991. A quarter of a century.

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Did he come to live there because it had become a madly fashionable place to be, very 'smart', very 'in', very 'top' ? Of course, that played its part. Painting is after all a luxury trade and it would have been foolish to scorn the 'before- and after-service'. Vincent was not a moralist philosopher like the dried-up "Senecas of the Café Sénéquier" as Blondin put it. He didn't disdain the pleasure he found in being in close proximity to some of the most beautiful creatures of the planet, drawn to the place like to a honey pot. He was delighted that his parties in his villas at Beauvallon, then at the Chapelle St Anne and then in his 'hotel particulier' in the Place de la Garonne always attracted the most glamorous people. And the beauty of the landscape never stopped bringing tears to his eyes (he often quoted a letter written by Bonnard in 1909: 'I suddenly had a Thousand-and-One Nights moment with the sea, the yellow walls, and the reflections as colourful as the sunlit spots.....'). And of course he was in seventh heaven to be welcomed as an equal by his famous fellow painters: Signac, Matisse,Derain, Braque and associates.
 
But if anyone was sceptical regarding the Tropezian 'bonfire of the vanities', it was Vincent. The feature that he loved in this town of high ostentation and pretence was the deep hidden Saint Tropez - the Saint Tropez of the ordinary people who mourned his death in 1991. They had adopted him back in the Sixties, despite all his haughty exuberance, because behind the facade they had spotted a genuine and good man. A man who liked nothing more than to walk alone, far from the hubbub of the Place des Lices or Pampelonne, into the heart of the peninsula where nature remains as elemental as at the first moments of Creation. A vivid memory comes to mind - the beach of l'Aqua around 1980; hard rock blaring; the loud chatter from a nearby disreputable gathering; Vincent on his lilo reading St John of the Cross.

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Jean-Michel ROYER