Painted in the vicinity of Crosàs adopted home at Saint-Clair, this sun-drenched image of an idyllic site along the Mediterranean coast near Saint-Tropez in southern France, exudes a sense of profound tranquillity. A broad plateau occupies the foreground. On the left, near the edge of this elevated vantage point, is a single pine tree, its trunk bent at midpoint; it leans sharply to the right, and its branches appear to rise above the large hill behind it in the middle ground. The branches of the solitary pine stretch across the sky, as if straining to touch the entan gled, leafy upper branches of the four taller, thinner, and more energized trees at the right, which twist and turn like dancers imbued with a shared rhythm.

Appropriating a time-honored conceit, Cross artfully uses these five trees to frame his view, as Cézanne had done in his slightly earlier homage to Mont Sainte-Victoire in neighboring Aix-en-Provence (fig. 1). Instead of tilled fields and Aix?s magical mountain, however, Cross presents us with a glimpse of pale blue water that begins at the foot of the foreground plateau and leads to a series of rolling hills that descend in soothing sequence to a clearly defined sliver of lavender shore. The shore cuts through the scene on a strict horizontal, parallel to the top and bottom of the canvas, just below the midpoint. The sky is a shimmering pink, its radiant light trans forming the view into a panoply of mauves, blues, greens, and golds3ƒ4a reminder of Crosàs romantic leanings and his willingness to abandon verisimilitude for a more inventive decorative schema. This inclination is apparent from the way the light bathes everything in the scene, as well as from its even distribution from foreground to background, which gently enhances the harmony Cross already established with his carefully controlled composition.

The Artist’s application of paint is equally well informed. Having adopted Seurat?s Divisionist technique in 1891, Cross covers his canvas with a multitude of tiny strokes that are both descriptive and ornamental. Initially, they look rather uniform, but closer inspection discloses more variety in their size, shape, and direction, underscoring Crosàs subtle handling of the paint?s physical weight and density. The strokes also contribute to the internal rela tionships that Cross devised among the trees, which are rendered with slightly longer strokes that appear to climb up the canvas, while the passages between the hills are composed of softer, rounder, and more dappled touches.

Crosàs strategies in creating this seductive image resulted from his interest in revealing the harmonies in the world by means of works of art and were an out-growth, as well, of the radical personal changes he had experienced in his youth. His father, a native of Douai, had failed in a commercial venture in Paris, and already at the age of ten, Cross had decided that he wanted to become an artist. In Lille, he studied first with the young Carolus-Duran, and in 1878, he enrolled in the Ecoles Académiques de Dessin et d?Architecture, taking classes with Alphonse Colas. With his parentà support, he moved to Paris in 18803ƒ4which would prove to be a critical decision in his career. In 1884, he met Georges Seurat and Seurat?s disciple Paul Signac, whose novel ideas about art immediately appealed to him. With no com punction or turning back, Cross abandoned his Realist style and academic method of painting, purchased a property in Saint-Clair in the South of France, and allied himself with the younger, French avant-garde artists intent on wresting the leadership away from the aging Impressionists. Together with Albert Dubois-Pillet, Odilon Redon, Seurat, and Signac, Cross helped to initi ate the Société des Artistes Indépendants, a rival to both the state-supported Salon and the Impressionistà inde pendent exhibitions. Over the course of a decade, Cross was active in the society, participating in each of its shows with the exception of 1889, when he exhibited with the Brussels artistà group Les Vingt. Continually refining his new Neo-Impressionist style, he forged a name for himself with the most discerning critics. Cross was also politically active as a supporter of the anarchist socialist movement in France3ƒ4along with the more vocal Signac3ƒ4which advocated that a more benevolent social order could only be achieved through radical change.

Like Signac, Cross believed that broken brushwork, heightened color, and compositional harmony in paint ings (as in the Lehman canvas) would have an aesthetic impact on its viewers and would further their vision of a utopian world. Although the anarchist-socialist dream remained elusive, Crosàs political ideals and such works as his Pines Along the Shore impressed a new generation of painters, among them Matisse, who joined the older artist in the South of France in 1904 for a painting cam paign based largely on Crosàs innovations. Thus, while its many venerable precedents include works by Claude Lorrain from the seventeenth century as well as examples by Corot and by Cézanne from the nineteenth, Crosàs Pines Along the Shore also anticipates such ground-breaking paintings as Matisse?s Luxe, calme et volupté, which led to Fauvism3ƒ4the first modern art movement of the twentieth century.

Signature:Signed and dated (bottom left): henri Edmond Cross 96.

Credit Line:Robert Lehman Collection, 1975

Provenance:

Count Harry Kessler, Weimar; Kessler sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, May 16, 1908, no. 12 (as The Pines on the Shore); sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, June 10, 1937, no. 32 (as The Pines on the Shore); acquired from the Galerie de L'3ò4lysée (Paul Ebstein), Paris, by Robert Lehman, New York, May 1950.

1896