Landscape in Provence

Henri-Edmond Cross had left Paris in 1891 for Saint-Clair, a hamlet on the Var coast near Le Lavandou, where the rheumatism that dogged him was easier to bear. By 1898 the fine dots of his neo-impressionist years had grown into square blocks of colour set side by side, a much coarser mosaic than the one Seurat had used. Paul Signac was a short way along the same coast at Saint-Tropez, and the two of them working there through the 1890s is a large part of why younger painters began coming south to look. The picture is in Cologne because the collector Gerard Corboud placed his impressionist and neo-impressionist holdings with the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in 2001, on permanent loan, and the museum added his foundation to its own name.