La Chaîne des Maures

By 1906 Henri-Edmond Cross had been living on the Mediterranean coast for years, at Saint-Clair near Le Lavandou, painting the wooded hills of the Maures range behind his house. The tiny dots of strict pointillism were behind him now. Here the colour comes in broad blocky touches, laid down like tiles, with bare canvas left to breathe between them. Cross said the neo-impressionists cared more about harmonies of pure colour than about matching the real colours of a hillside, and you can watch him choose warmth over accuracy. Two summers earlier Matisse had come down to paint beside him and Paul Signac on this same coast and carried the lesson back north. What Cross left is a chain of hills built almost entirely out of separate marks of orange, green and violet.