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Lot Essay
This work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Henri Edmond Cross being prepared by Patrick Offenstadt.
A northerner, born in industrial Douai and having received his arts education in Lille and Paris, Henri-Edmond Cross relocated to the Midi in 1891. He had been painting occasionally along the Mediterranean coast since 1883, when Dr. Auguste Soin, an elderly, wealthy relative who was acting as the artist’s benefactor, invited the young man and his parents to spend the summer at his new home in Monaco. Having begun in his mid-thirties to suffer the effects of chronic rheumatoid arthritis, Cross hoped the dry warmth of the southern climate would ameliorate his symptoms.
After searching along the coast for a place off the beaten track, Cross rented a small house in Cabasson, a tiny hamlet across from Le Lavandou on Cap Bénat in the Var region. He wrote to his friend Paul Signac: “Hills of pines and cork oaks come to die away gently into the sea, offering, in passing, a sandy beach of a fineness unknown on the shores of the Channel” (quoted in C. Homburg, Neo-Impressionism and the Dream of Realities, exh. cat., The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., 2014, p. 134).
Cross strongly recommended the area, later called the Côte d’Azur, to Signac. Following an inland waterway route, Signac during the spring of 1892 sailed his small yacht Olympia from Brittany into the Mediterranean, then proceeded to Saint-Tropez, where he rented a cottage overlooking the sea. In May the painter-sailor wrote to Cross: “I have enough here to keep me busy all my life—I have just discovered happiness” (quoted in ibid., p. 139).
Having appreciated the relative isolation and tranquility of Cabasson, Cross in 1892 purchased some land in Saint-Clair, an even smaller commune near Le Lavandou, and there had a house built as his permanent residence, from which he periodically visited Paris.
To overcome the tendency of the pointillist technique to flatten space, a pitfall for the landscape painter who needs to evoke distance, Cross in Étude pour Les chèvres adroitly managed the placement of his motifs and the transition of complementary colour values. A swerving line of purple and green ground foliage leads the eye around the rocky verge in the right foreground of the composition to the stone outhouse nestled among the pine trees—possibly the artist’s own—and the dense woodland beyond.
A northerner, born in industrial Douai and having received his arts education in Lille and Paris, Henri-Edmond Cross relocated to the Midi in 1891. He had been painting occasionally along the Mediterranean coast since 1883, when Dr. Auguste Soin, an elderly, wealthy relative who was acting as the artist’s benefactor, invited the young man and his parents to spend the summer at his new home in Monaco. Having begun in his mid-thirties to suffer the effects of chronic rheumatoid arthritis, Cross hoped the dry warmth of the southern climate would ameliorate his symptoms.
After searching along the coast for a place off the beaten track, Cross rented a small house in Cabasson, a tiny hamlet across from Le Lavandou on Cap Bénat in the Var region. He wrote to his friend Paul Signac: “Hills of pines and cork oaks come to die away gently into the sea, offering, in passing, a sandy beach of a fineness unknown on the shores of the Channel” (quoted in C. Homburg, Neo-Impressionism and the Dream of Realities, exh. cat., The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., 2014, p. 134).
Cross strongly recommended the area, later called the Côte d’Azur, to Signac. Following an inland waterway route, Signac during the spring of 1892 sailed his small yacht Olympia from Brittany into the Mediterranean, then proceeded to Saint-Tropez, where he rented a cottage overlooking the sea. In May the painter-sailor wrote to Cross: “I have enough here to keep me busy all my life—I have just discovered happiness” (quoted in ibid., p. 139).
Having appreciated the relative isolation and tranquility of Cabasson, Cross in 1892 purchased some land in Saint-Clair, an even smaller commune near Le Lavandou, and there had a house built as his permanent residence, from which he periodically visited Paris.
To overcome the tendency of the pointillist technique to flatten space, a pitfall for the landscape painter who needs to evoke distance, Cross in Étude pour Les chèvres adroitly managed the placement of his motifs and the transition of complementary colour values. A swerving line of purple and green ground foliage leads the eye around the rocky verge in the right foreground of the composition to the stone outhouse nestled among the pine trees—possibly the artist’s own—and the dense woodland beyond.