The Cypresses at Cagnes

In 1908 Cagnes-sur-Mer was filling up with painters who had come south for the light and, often enough, for their health. Renoir had just settled there on his doctors' advice, his hands deformed by arthritis. Cross painted this hillside the same year and knew that kind of trouble from the inside: rheumatism, arthritis and failing eyesight had been pushing him to change the way he worked since the mid-1890s. The fine dot of his Neo-Impressionist years is gone here. He lays the colour in broad squared touches with bare canvas showing between them, so the cypresses and the olive slope behind them hold together as a mosaic of separate marks. He died in 1910, and the canvas reached the French national collections 13 years after that, given by the Countess Vitali in memory of her brother.