农庄,清晨

Henri-Edmond Cross painted this in 1893, a couple of years after he left Paris for the Mediterranean coast, partly for his health, and settled among the farms and umbrella pines near the sea. By then he was building his pictures entirely from small, regular dots of pure colour, the Neo-Impressionist method he had taken up in the wake of Seurat. He made this farmyard twice, once as morning and once as evening, so the same buildings could be seen under two different lights. The scene is a calm, unhurried vision of country life, warmed by the southern sun he had moved south to find. The city of Nancy bought the painting in 1998 for its museum of fine arts.