Menton from Cap Martin places Léon Detroy (1859–1955) in a setting he returned to repeatedly — the luminous, sun-saturated edge of the Mediterranean, where the Côte d'Azur meets the Italian border and the light takes on a quality unlike anywhere else in France. Detroy's life in painting was one of principled independence. Born in Chinon in the Loire Valley into a cultured bourgeois family, he entered the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris but quickly grew restless with its academic constraints. What he wanted was the outdoors — and he found it first in the Creuse valley, where he arrived in 1887, even before Armand Guillaumin, and where he eventually became one of the defining figures of the celebrated École de Crozant alongside Guillaumin and Monet. He met Monet there, befriended him, and painted alongside him in the landscape that George Sand had made famous. But Detroy was a traveller by temperament, moving from northern Europe to North Africa, from Brittany to Provence, from the Creuse to the Côte d'Azur. He brought the same restless curiosity to every landscape he encountered — working in Impressionism, Pointillism or something approaching Fauvism depending on what the subject demanded, always refusing to be pinned to a single style. The view from Cap Martin over Menton — the sweep of the bay, the pale buildings climbing the hillside, the sea — is a subject that attracted painters of the highest calibre. Detroy met it on his own terms. His friends and admirers included Vuillard, Bonnard, Friesz and Anquetin. He lived to ninety-six, painting until the end.