Pomeriggio a Pardigon (Var)

Cross moved to the Var coast in 1891, to a village called Saint-Clair near Le Lavandou, partly because the heat was easier on his rheumatism. Pardigon is a beach a few kilometres along the same shore, and he worked on this canvas there from June to October 1907.

By then his touch had opened right up. The tight dots of his neo-impressionist years had grown into broad separate blocks of colour with bare canvas left showing between them, so the surface reads as mosaic rather than stipple. Younger painters noticed. Matisse spent the summer of 1904 nearby at Saint-Tropez and came over to see him, and the divided colour he tried out that season fed into the Fauve pictures of the year after.

Cross died at Saint-Clair in 1910, at 54. The canvas belongs to the Musee d'Orsay and has hung in Nancy on long-term loan since 2012.