Henri-Edmond Cross

Henri-Edmond Cross moved south to the Mediterranean coast for his health and found his real subject there: pine, sea and hot light near Saint-Tropez, long before that village was fashionable. He built these views out of small, separate touches of pure colour in the Neo-Impressionist method he took up alongside Paul Signac.

Over the 1890s his dots grew into broader, mosaic-like blocks and his colour turned frankly unnatural, oranges and violets tuned for pure sensation rather than accuracy. That freedom fed the next generation.

In 1904 the young Henri Matisse spent a summer near Cross and Signac on the coast, and the bright, loosened painting that followed helped launch Fauvism. Cross died of cancer in 1910, having spent his last twenty years by that same sea.