Brief Report

Luce painted more than a dozen views of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris in the 1890s and increasingly in the early years of the 20th century. This painting is one of the last in the series and is not only the largest, but is also the "widest-angle" view, taking in more of the surroundings than any other [Bouin-Luce/Bazetoux 1986, vol. 2, cat. no. 143-157, pp 41-46]. Luce chose an industrially pre-primed canvas of medium-dense weave, which, authentically stretching on the original stretcher is not in one of the standard French sizes (fig. 2). The white, pore-filling ground only just covers the elevations of the weave, influencing not only the appearance of individual paint applications, which in many places come across as perforated, but also the general surface characteristics of the painting. Before starting to paint, Luce fixed the most important elements of the architecture and streets in a two-stage underdrawing process (figs 9, 10). No sequence of paint applications can be identified, as throughout the picture they reciprocally overlap at the boundaries of individual zones of motifs. It is clear, however, that Luce first established the main colours and forms in predominantly thin paint applications. In the pale areas, for example the cloudy sky, he deliberately integrated the white ground by applying no paint (fig. 4). Only exceptionally does the brushwork evince any long strokes, for example in the steps leading down to the Seine bottom left. In general, short strokes dominate, their direction changing all the time and often crossing, along with dabs of paint, which increase in fineness especially in details such as the figures and horses on the bridge (fig. 11). The great majority of superimposed paint applications involved no mixing of the colours, so that there must have been drying phases, which cannot be specified more precisely, during the painting process. Wet-in-wet mixing of individual brush-strokes can only be seen in the uppermost layers, apparently applied during the final session. The paints are largely pure, being mixed only with white. They thus generate all in all a pastel-like impression, within which hues from pink to violet dominate. In places individual brush-strokes also reveal the transport and application of incompletely mixed paints of different pigmentation (fig. 12), but these are mostly colours that are immediate neighbours in the spectrum, for example blue and violet. The 1901-04 dating, in all probability Luce's own, within the signature of the painting (fig. 6) must be subject to question in view of an inscription on the canvas verso, detected in the context of the present examination, which states "Luce 1902-1904" (fig. 7).

Maximilien Luce
Notre Dame, View from Quai Michel, 1901/1904, oil on canvas, 100.0 x 118.7 cm, WRM Dep. FC 692

Maximilien Luce

born on 13 March 1858 in Paris,
died on 6 February 1941 ibidem

Brief report with complete data as downloadable pdf-file

Further illustrations:

Fig. 02

Verso


Fig. 03

Raking light


Fig. 04

Transmitted light


Fig. 05

UV fluorescence


Fig. 06

Detail, signature


Fig. 07

Detail, canvas verso, barely legible inscription stating artist's name and date of picture in normal incident light (top) and after digital processing (bottom)


Fig. 08

Detail, bottom turnover edge of the canvas with extant selvage and edge of ground


Fig. 09

Underdrawing line in black (charcoal?) and subsequent blue medium, microscopic photograph (M = 1 mm)


Fig. 10

Detail, IR reflectogram with visible first lay-in of the transept further to the right than in the painted picture


Fig. 11

Detail, meticulous dabbing paint applications to depict people and horse-drawn carts on the bridge


Fig. 12

Differently pigmented paint only mixed on the canvas, microscopic photograph (M = 1 mm)


Fig. 13

Remains of the setting of a frame pressed into the still wet paint-layer, revealing an orange-red paint-layer on the side facing the surface of the picture, microscopic photograph (M = 1 mm)