HENRI-EDMOND CROSS|9 MIN READ

What Makes Henri-Edmond Cross Art Distinctive

A painter leaves Paris for the Mediterranean and writes to his mother that he has just discovered happiness. The six works gathered here hold the stories of what that happiness looked like, and where it led.

WRITER Moryarty

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Two women by the Mediterranean shore
Henri-Edmond Cross, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Henri-Edmond Cross art is a story about what a change of light can do to a painter. Cross was a French Neo-Impressionist who left Paris in 1891 and moved to the Mediterranean coast for his health. The six works gathered here all came after that move: early Mediterranean oils, mature Riviera paintings, a Venetian watercolour and a late watercolour.

What sets them apart isn't one fixed style but a way of thinking in patches of separated colour. That method changed as Cross aged, and so did the company he kept: Seurat's influence gave way to a looser touch, and late watercolours joined brush and pen. Their histories kept moving too, through a posthumous sale in Paris, American collectors and eventual homes in museums in Chicago, Washington, Philadelphia, Cleveland and New York.

How Beach at Cabasson (Baigne-Cul) marked Cross's turn to pointillism

The road to Beach at Cabasson (Baigne-Cul) began with a health decision. In 1891 Cross left Paris for Cabasson, a small hamlet on the Côte d'Azur, because rheumatoid arthritis pushed him toward a milder climate.

Beach at Cabasson

He had already spent years inside the Neo-Impressionist circle. In 1884 he was one of the founders of the Société des Artistes Indépendants, and he counted Camille Pissarro, Georges Seurat and Paul Signac among his friends. Yet he didn't adopt their divided brushwork until he reached the Mediterranean coast in 1891.

In this beach scene he put the method to work as a system. The small dashes and dots of colour, organised in careful tonal gradations, make the picture both a study of regional colour and heat and a landscape. The patient construction was a departure from the quicker, more intuitive strokes of the Impressionists, which had been tuned to catching fleeting moments of weather.

The debt to Seurat goes beyond the dots. From Seurat he took the decorative construction of the surface and an abstract analysis of landscape.

The painting looks forward to the idealised figural landscapes of Matisse, who later worked with Cross.

An early owner was Baron Eberhard von Bodenhausen-Degener of Munich, who lived from 1868 to 1918. Today it belongs to the Art Institute of Chicago and isn't on display at present.

What happened to Calanque des Antibois after Cross's death

Calanque des Antibois is an oil on canvas from Cross's first Mediterranean years. It belongs to his early views of the southern coast, a group that applies the Divisionist technique Georges Seurat had developed in the late 1880s, and the paint is applied in small dots of red, orange, blue and purple.

Calanque des Antibois

The painting appeared in the posthumous sale of his work at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris on 28 October 1921, as lot 24, eleven years after his death in 1910. The Paris dealer Léopold Zborowski handled it afterwards.

In 1950 the American collector John Hay Whitney bought the painting, moving it from the Paris trade into an American collection. More than three decades later, in 1982, it entered the National Gallery of Art in Washington as part of the John Hay Whitney Collection.

In its 1998 to 1999 exhibition of the sixteen paintings given by John Hay Whitney and his wife Betsey Cushing Whitney, the National Gallery used this painting as the lead image.

What changed in Cross's style in Two Women by the Shore, Mediterranean

Two Women by the Shore, Mediterranean is a seascape of the Provençal coast, painted in 1896, five years after he settled in the south.

Two Women by the Shore

What had changed by then is the size of the individual brushstroke. Instead of the granular pointillism practised in Paris, Cross set down mosaic-like brushstrokes that are larger and looser. The whole scene is painted in cool blues and purples, with touches of yellow, orange and pink, as the two women sit near the shoreline.

The Barnes Foundation suggests comparing the painting with Seurat's Models, painted between 1886 and 1888, to see how the dotted technique changed.

The original remains at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, where it carries the inventory number BF436. The foundation's research note on the painting takes its title from the line "I Would like to Paint Happiness", which echoes the happiness Cross found in the south.

Who gave The Pink Cloud to Cleveland

The Pink Cloud carries the warmth of Cross's Riviera years into a single oil on canvas. Dating from about 1896, it belongs to his mature style, the period when his Riviera views were built from dabs of colour in the Neo-Impressionist manner. The artist's own title was Le Nuage rose. A pink cloud dominates the sky above blue water and green land.

The Pink Cloud

A few years earlier, he had left Paris for Saint-Clair, a small village on the Mediterranean coast. Cross, who had persistent rheumatism, was better off in the milder climate. To his mother he wrote that he had just discovered happiness in the region.

The village became a meeting point. Young painters who would soon be called the Fauves, Henri Matisse among them, visited Cross at Saint-Clair, and his Riviera views as a body of work inspired them.

The painting passed through Galerie Hopkins-Custot in Paris, which sold it to the collectors Nancy F. and Joseph P. Keithley.

In 2020 the Keithleys gave The Pink Cloud to the Cleveland Museum of Art. It joined a wider gift of more than one hundred works, part of which is promised to the museum but hasn't yet been given.

How a journey with his wife led to Venice-The Giudecca

Venice-The Giudecca came out of a journey Cross made with his wife in 1903. The sheet shows sailboats on blue water, with a low line of Venetian buildings on the horizon behind them.

Venice-The Giudecca

Unlike the oils of the earlier sections, this sheet combines watercolour with graphite and charcoal on heavy white wove paper.

Like his close friend and neighbour Paul Signac, Cross used watercolour sketches to prepare oil paintings, and those oils could take months in the studio.

The sheet resembles the watercolours Signac made before he saw Paul Cézanne's late watercolours in 1908.

The original arrived at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York with the Robert Lehman Collection in 1975.

Why Landscape with Stars recalls Japanese painting

Landscape with Stars belongs to Cross's last years at Saint-Clair, where his close friend Paul Signac lived nearby. It's part of his final watercolour practice before his death at Saint-Clair in 1910.

Landscape with Stars

The sheet brings two ways of working together. The star-streaked sky is painted in watercolour on white wove paper, and the landscape below is drawn in pen and ink.

The sky is made of long broken brushstrokes, the kind that characterise Cross's late works. The stars are bright yellow against the deep blue around them.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art finds the landscape's impressionistic treatment reminiscent of Japanese painting. The landscape below is gently simplified beneath a scattering of stars.

Like the Venice watercolour, this sheet reached the Metropolitan Museum with the Robert Lehman Collection in 1975.

Stand a few steps back from any of these works and the separate touches of colour mix in the eye. That's also what you get when you hang a print of one of them on a wall. You can see it in this tall-pined coastal view or in his other 1903 view of the Venice lagoon.

Did you know?

  • The Galerie Druet in Paris held Cross's first solo exhibition in 1905, and in 1907 Félix Fénéon organised a retrospective at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune.
  • On the same Venice journey, Cross painted the Festa del Redentore, the festival Venice holds to give thanks for its survival of the plague of 1576.
  • His oil painting Regatta in Venice, made in 1903 and 1904, is held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
  • Born in Douai in 1856, the painter is listed by the Metropolitan Museum under both names, Cross and Delacroix.
  • The Metropolitan Museum of Art's store has produced a silk scarf based on Landscape with Stars.

Questions people ask about Henri-Edmond Cross

What style of art is Henri-Edmond Cross known for? Cross is known as a Neo-Impressionist who used divided colour, the technique often called Pointillism. In the circle around Seurat and Signac, the individual strokes were called tâches.

When did Henri-Edmond Cross start painting with Pointillism? He began in 1891, the year he moved south from Paris for his health. One of those early southern works was a painting of a Mediterranean cove, and the painting is now in Washington.

Why did Henri-Edmond Cross change his name? Cross was born Henri-Edmond-Joseph Delacroix. He changed his surname to Cross to avoid confusion with Eugène Delacroix, the earlier Romantic painter.

Which Henri-Edmond Cross paintings should I start with? For his turn to divided colour, start with Beach at Cabasson (Baigne-Cul). For mature Riviera light, turn to The Pink Cloud, and for travel watercolour, look at Venice-The Giudecca.

Where do the original paintings hang? The six works discussed in this article are in American public collections: the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

About the author

Moryarty has more than 2,000 vintage posters, and each is restored by hand without changing its original design or colours. Every poster is printed in-house in our Barcelona workshop on 230 gsm fine art matte paper with archival pigment inks. If a question comes to you while reading, you're welcome to write to us.

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