Who painted it, when and where?
This oil on canvas from 1899 was painted by Henri-Edmond Cross in Provence (South of France). Cross is a French painter and lithographer, born in Douai on May 20, 1856. He died in Saint-Clair in Lavandou on May 16, 1910. He is representative of pointillist painting and is close to the libertarian movement.
What can we see?
In the painting we see a tilted boat, barrels unloaded on the bank and a small Provencal port in the background. The shapes are less geometric than in the works produced by Cross a few years earlier. Fascinated by the Var, Henri-Edmond Cross paints without concern for chromatic plausibility, rather translating an inner vision. The brushstrokes are applied in all directions, as if to differentiate the materials. The brushstrokes remain divided, but are wider, the less systematic execution is freer and faster, even going so far as to leave some impasto. The shape of the fingerboard helps to give rhythm.
Cross and pointillism
In fact in 1895, Henri-Edmond Cross abandoned the technique of the point which lined the surface of the painting equally. From a chromatic point of view, the artist believes that one cannot scientifically reproduce light. He therefore endeavours to suggest its intensity through the exaltation of colours and the frankness of oppositions. The pure shades mixed with white which gave this damped radiance so particular to his neo-impressionist paintings and by which he wanted to express light by discoloration have succeeded sumptuous golds, oranges, purples, pinks, greens and bright blues. Cross builds his composition here on an alternation of light and dark horizontal parallel bands, reserving cold colours for dark values and warm colours for light tones.
Representative artist of pointillist painting, Cross follows several movements like naturalism and impressionism, before making friends with neo-impressionist painters, with whom he shares anarchist convictions.
The new way of Cross and the neo-impressionists is characterized by more scientific research, inspired by the optical discoveries of the end of the 19th century. The mixing of colors is no longer done on the palette, nor even on canvas.
It is the eye of the beholder who, at a certain distance from the painting, performs the "optical mixture": blue touches placed next to yellow touches, thus, giving shades of green.
Cross later influenced Henri Matisse and the Fauve painters by his talents and his daring colour technique.
Henri-Edmond Cross, La barque bleue, huile sur toile, 1899, © Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon/François Jay, inv. DG 254
Comments