Paesaggio con stelle

The name is a small joke on history. This watercolour is by Henri-Edmond Delacroix, who signed himself Cross, an English rendering of his surname chosen partly to avoid confusion with the earlier painter Eugene Delacroix. By around 1906, when he made this, Cross was living on the Mediterranean coast and had loosened the strict dot-by-dot method of Neo-Impressionism he had learned alongside his friend Paul Signac. Long broken strokes of colour drift across the paper to catch a sky full of stars, with a darker landscape drawn in pen and ink below. That spare, inky foreground has often been compared to the Japanese prints French artists were studying closely in those years.