Fishermen (Var)

By the time Cross painted this, he had been living for years at Saint-Clair, a hamlet on the Var coast of Provence near Le Lavandou. The stretch of Mediterranean he could see from his door was not yet a resort. It was a working coast, and fishing was the trade of the men around him. That is what he set down here: fishermen out on the water, the ordinary labour of the place he had chosen. He built the scene from separate touches of bright, unmixed colour, so the sea breaks into a field of shifting light. The Var he knew was warm, poor and quiet, decades before the crowds came down to it.