Brief Report

The Landscape in Provence is one in a series of Pointillist landscapes painted by Cross in southern France [Compin 1964, no. 65, p. 156]. For a picture support he chose a canvas sold by the Parisian colour merchant Paul Foinet in the standard P 25 size with a pale pink ground, whose colour seems to match the nuances described in contemporary commercial trade catalogues as rosé or rosé gris [Callen 2000, p. 66] (fig. 6). But while Cross retained this ground for his 1896 painting Sunset (WRM Dep. FC 708), here he decided against it and re-primed the entire canvas with white paint applied with a brush (fig. 6). One particularly striking feature of the painting’s creation can be discerned on the left-hand edge, where the otherwise closely juxtaposed brush-strokes reveal sizable areas of the white ground (fig. 7): here, pale-blue paint has been applied in all directions without any direct connexion with the motif that we see today. Closer inspection reveals that all these areas have been scratched with a sharp instrument and abraded, presumably a deliberate act by the artist himself in an effort to get rid of some existing painting (fig. 8). What followed, in any case, was a sketch-like underdrawing in charcoal, which marks all the essential outlines of the present painting (fig. 10). In line with the Divisionist theory of Neoimpressionism, Cross filled the whole area of the picture with a multitude of brush-dabs of similar size but of many different colours, although it appears that the sailing-boat along with the figures and flowering shrubs in the bottom right-hand corner were not originally planned. It was only during the painting process that Cross added the outline of the boat in blue paint and that of the couple and the grasses in graphite or lead pencil, thus completing the composition (figs. 11, 12).

Henri Edmond Cross
Landscape in Provence, 1898, oil on canvas, 60.3 x 81.2 cm, WRM Dep. FC 659

Henri Edmond Cross

born on 20 May 1856 in Douai,
died 16 May 1910 in Saint-Clair (Var)

Brief report with complete data as downloadable pdf-file

Further illustrations:

Fig. 02

Verso


Fig. 03

Raking light


Fig. 04

UV-fluorescence photograph


Fig. 05

Detail, signature


Fig. 06

Detail, top edge of picture, two layers of pale pink ground
(commercially preprimed), with white layer above (presumably
applied by the artist)


Fig. 07

Detail, left-hand edge of picture, red arrows mark areas where ground is visible with preliminary applications of pale-blue paint later rejected by the artist


Fig. 08

Detail from fig. 7, the first lay-in in blue paint was apparently deliberately rubbed and scratched away,
microscopic photograph (M = 1 mm)


Fig. 09

Detail, sailing boat added at a late stage, its outlines first being drawn in blue paint on the existing paint layer


Fig. 10

Traces of an underdrawing in black charcoal,
microscopic photograph (M = 1 mm)


Fig. 11

Detail bottom righthand corner in incident light (top) and in the IR reflectogram with clearly visible pencil underdrawing (bottom)


Fig. 12

Detail of fig. 11, hair of the woman, her outlines were only
added in pencil after the underlying paint layer had dried, microscopic photograph (M = 1 mm)