The rocky coastline of the Mediterranean was Adolphe Louis Gaussen's territory more completely than almost any other painter of his generation. Born in Marseilles in 1871, he spent his life along this stretch of coast — studying it, painting it, and eventually becoming its most authoritative visual chronicler. The appointment as official painter to the French naval department in 1928 was a recognition of something that was already clear from the work: nobody understood this particular relationship between rock, sea and light more deeply. Côte Rocheuse gives you the full measure of that understanding. The colour is specific to the Mediterranean — the intense blue-green of deep water, the bleached grey of limestone in strong light, the way shadow falls cold and precise across warm stone in the heat of the southern afternoon. There is nothing impressionistic in the loose sense about how Gaussen handles this. The paint is applied with a marine painter's economy — nothing wasted, everything structural — but the light is absolutely felt. His one of his favourite subjects was La Corniche, the great sea cliff stretching east from Cap Ferrat where the mountains plunge directly into the sea, and works of this character carry that same drama of land meeting water at its most abrupt and spectacular. Gaussen studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Marseilles and exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Français from 1893. He was appointed curator of the Musée Cantini in Marseilles and made an Officier of the Légion d'Honneur. His work is held in the Musée d'Orsay, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Marseilles, the Réattu Museum in Arles and the National Maritime Museum.