“The light is of an adorable quality. I persist in believing that this country is the most beautiful in the world.” So wrote the neo-impressionist painter Henri-Edmond Cross of France’s Var region in 1906, where he had moved to ease his rheumatism some fifteen years earlier at the suggestion of his friend and fellow painter Paul Signac. Cross, who was born Henri-Edmond Delacroix but simplified his name to its root noun and then anglicized it to avoid confusion with the great Romantic artist Eugène Delacroix, may not be the first painter to come to mind when considering the influence of southern France’s unique light on the evolution of French art, but he was literally one of the first to do so, making regular visits from 1883 and finally settling in the region permanently in 1891. Saint-Tropez’s Musée de l’Annonciade, situated in a former chapel that was converted for use as boatbuilding workshop and which now hosts a vivid collection of paintings with local associations produced roughly from 1890 to 1950, has launched a charming retrospective, “Henri Edmond Cross dans la Lumière du Var.”
Saint-Tropez is more of a yacht destination these days. No visitor can fail to notice the massive numbers of vessels that converge in the town’s large bay every summer or the ritzy crowds who gather on its beaches and spray champagne at its nightspots. In Cross’s time, however, it was an attractive, pleasant fishing village with a robust marine manufacturing industry. He stopped in the town while on his way to Cabasson, a less visited but nonetheless charming seaside town about twenty-five miles to the west, where he lived for two years before removing to Saint-Clair, a more remote place he found by accident while scouting for ideal painting locales. In Saint-Clair, he built a house designed to allow him to paint the views from his windows. He died there in 1910.
After hitting the beach at Cabasson with a series of marine paintings, Cross ventured inland, where he found a countryside unmarred by fin-de-siècle tourism and development. Both beach and inland settings allowed for an exploration of color. Plage de la Vignasse (1891–92) exceeded the impressionist idiom by moving away from considerations of light purely in relation to form and toward a bolder use of it to convey mood. Using a brush technique drawn from pointillism, Signac’s main technique, pure colors are installed more as landmarks to contrast with a series of lines that capture the sea’s calm undulations as they extend out toward the coastal islands of Porquerolles and Port-Cros, destinations still favored by today’s discerning yachtsman. In La Ferme (matin) of 1893, Cross again prioritized line by stylizing the farmhouse, the main object a conventional painter would have foregrounded, instead emphasizing the farmstead’s bouilleurs de cru (large distilling devices usually used to make eau-de-vie, the hard-edged digestif), their operators, and an angular tree that shelters them from the sun as they proceed with what the picture’s relaxed mien suggests is pleasant work.
Cross eventually became dissatisfied with this technique, which he thought borrowed too heavily from the mannered dapples of pointillism to properly capture the true essence of his natural environment. Signac came to the same conclusion around the same time, in the year 1895, and also moved toward a more vivid conception of harmony, a veritable “second” neo-impressionism. Cross was influenced by the experimental theater of the day, which sometimes choreographed its action in a linear style akin to bas-relief sculpture. Nocturne (1896), believed to be inspired by evening scenes in the symbolist writer Édouard Dujardin’s 1892 play Le Chevalier du passé, imparts a melancholic mood, with a trio of toga-clad women foregrounded before a bank of severe cypress trees that jut vertically, standing guard over a darkened harbor with stylized ships. In Paysage provençal (1898), Cross went further, swapping natural color with the colors that his imagination perceived in one of those summer sunsets over the Mediterranean, more reminiscent of the “purple light of a summer night in Spain” that Cole Porter mentioned a generation later in his song “You’re the Top” than the golden radiance one normally envisions.
Alas, this second period proved short, for Cross’s ailing health, complicated further by failing eyesight and cancer, limited his painting for several years. By 1904, however, he had sufficiently recovered to make his landscapes more radically vivid. While his earlier color schemes were complementary and tended to blend into each other, his revised approach was animated by sharp contrasts of more vibrant colors. A certain departure from nature as it truly appeared was unavoidable, with much more abstraction reflecting sensory perceptions unique to the Var’s distinctive climate. La Baie de la Cavalière (1906–07) depicts a country outing with Cross’s wife and family friends in which the human figures are barely distinguishable from the surrounding landscape. The exceptionally light-blue water of the bay defines the coastline, but the inland vegetation ranges from dark-purple shades to bright yellows and oranges that were undoubtedly more the product of memory and sensation than observation. Only the overhanging boughs of green above a purple-trunked tree remind the viewer of nature as it really looked. Le Naufrage (1906–07), which made it into the Musée d’Orsay’s collection, presents an even sharper contrast, with the sea depicted mainly in white with only residual contours of blue. The titular shipwreck is confined to the very top of the canvas, where a stylized jib with an improbable orange sail crashes into a reef of unlikely green. Cross’s technique from this final phase of his life opened the path to Fauvism, which André Derain and Henri Matisse began to develop at around the same time of Cross’s evolution. Unlike Matisse, however, Cross never fully abandoned at least a semblance of recognizable form.
Cross’s most striking works of this period were certainly his nudes, which occupy an entire room of the exhibition. Painting human figures was a new frontier for Cross, for only after his first exhibition, in 1905, was he able to afford travel expenses for a model to come pose in his bucolic surroundings. Known only as Cécile, she was captured in a number of canvases, notably the provocative La Toilette (ca. 1906), in which she posed fully naked with a confident and unapologetic expression directly meeting the viewer’s gaze. Propped on a chair beside a distressed bed that suggests conjugal afterglow, she sits at a turned angle, offering a hint of her bare breast but covering her genitalia. The sensual purple of the curtains in the background again reflects sensations of the climate, while a distant blue, a hint of the sea, reminds us of the setting.
Most of Cross’s nudes, however, combine his appreciation for the models he could newly afford with his contrasting illumination of nature. Faune (1905–06), inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem “L’Après-midi d’un faune” (The Afternoon of a Faun), which also inspired Claude Debussy in music and Vaslav Nijinsky in dance, revisits the mythological half-human creature to suggest what Cross most valued in his surroundings. Sick though Cross was much of the time, the Var was a place of sensual liberation. Just as he found his creative idiom there, the fully nude faun frolics in a landscape of light purples and yellows while darker vegetation vibrates sensually in the distance. For an arthritic man losing his sight and battling cancer before meeting death at age fifty-three, the image might well have represented his highest ideal of freedom.