Vue de Saint-Tropez

Maximilien Luce’s Vue de Saint-Tropez pays homage to a place that, since the beginning of their pictorial revolution, had attracted and fascinated the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters. Depicting a panoramic view of the Gulf of Saint-Tropez, the picture evokes a classic composition, introducing the scene by means of a tree, adhering to the great French tradition of landscape painting. The brilliant hues and the careful orchestration of the scene, however, reveal Luce’s talent as a colourist: set in between the green of the foreground and the blue of the sea, the red and orange tones of Saint-Tropez resonate in all their vibrant shades. Although Luce had begun to comply less rigorously with the Divisionist theory from 1895 onwards, with Vue de Saint-Tropez he seems to be looking back at his career’s beginning, exploiting the complementary colours and returning to more controlled, minute brushstrokes.

In 1904 – the year Vue de Saint-Tropez was painted – Luce exhibited at the at the Exposition des Peintres Impressionistes organised in Belgium by La Libre Esthétique society. For the occasion, Luce sent five paintings, all dedicated to Paris except for one, Le Port de Saint-Tropez (1893). The subject of Saint-Tropez was thus of great importance to the artist, offering a luminous, warm pendant to his misty and foggy renderings of nocturnal Paris.