Das Haar

In 1891 Georges Seurat, the young painter who had invented the dot-by-dot method of Neo-Impressionism, died suddenly at 31. Henri-Edmond Cross had taken up that method only shortly before, and around the same time he left Paris for good to settle on the Mediterranean coast. He painted this the next year, in 1892, a woman and the great loose mass of her hair, built entirely from small separate touches of pure colour that mix in the eye rather than on the canvas. Cross was one of the few who carried Seurat's technique forward after his death, loosening the tiny dots over the years into a broader mosaic of colour, the kind the young Matisse would study when he spent a summer nearby in 1904.