The Glade

By the time Cross painted this woodland clearing, around 1906, he had lived for years at Saint-Clair, a quiet stretch of the French Riviera near his friend the painter Paul Signac. Both built a picture from separate touches of colour, and here you can watch Cross loosen Seurat's tiny dot into broad, tile-like dabs, pushing the greens and violets well past what the eye really sees. That heightened colour was in the air. A year before, in 1905, the young painters soon nicknamed the Fauves, the wild beasts, had startled Paris with canvases blazing in the same direction, and several of them had worked on this very coast. Cross built the scene up from a small oil study he called a clearing in Provence. The finished canvas stands over a metre and a half tall and hangs today in Cologne.