Playa de la Vignasse, las Islas de Oro

1891 was the year Georges Seurat died suddenly at 31, and it was also the year Henri-Edmond Cross left Paris for good and settled at Saint-Clair on the Mediterranean coast of the Var, near his friend Paul Signac. Down there he committed fully to the small, separate dots of pure colour that Seurat had pioneered. This stretch of the Îles d'Hyères, which he called the Golden Isles, is built almost entirely from horizontal bands, the sand and sea and sky dissolving into flecks of orange, violet and green. He showed it with four other southern landscapes at the Salon des Indépendants in 1892. Stand back and the dots blend in the eye. Step close and the beach breaks apart into separate touches of colour.