| Henri-Edmond Cross | |
|---|---|
Cypresses at Cagnes (c. 1900) by Henri-Edmond Cross |
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| Born | 20 May 1856 Douai |
| Died | 16 May 1910 (aged 53) Saint-Clair |
| Nationality | French |
| Field | Painting |
| Movement | Neo-impressionism,Pointillism |
Henri-Edmond Cross (20 May 1856 – 16 May 1910) was a French neo-impressionist, pointillist painter.
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Cross was born in Douai and grew up in Lille, in Northern France. He was born Henri-Edmond Joseph Delacroix, but changed his name to Cross ("croix" in French) so to avoid being confused with the French romantic master Eugene Delacroix. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His early works, portraits and still lifes, were in the dark colors of realism, but after meeting with Claude Monet in 1883, he painted in the brighter colors of Impressionism, especially outdoor scenes. In 1884, Cross co-founded the Société des Artistes Indépendants with Georges Seurat. He went on to become one of the principal exponents of neo-impressionism. He began his Pointillist period after spending time with Paul Signac. His later works are Fauvist, perhaps influenced by his acquaintance with Henri Matisse.
Henri-Edmond Cross befriended the neo-impressionist pointillist painters Georges Seurat and Paul Signac in the 1880s, but did not adopt their divisionist style until 1891. He spent the winters of 1883 through 1891 in the south of France, settling there permanently in 1891. Enchanted by the area, he described his response in a letter to Paul Signac: "Hills with pines and cork-oaks melt slowly into the sea. . . . Charming and intimate nooks swarm next to magical and picturesque views. Yes, these two terms are the most accurate to describe the sensations I have experienced here until now."(Françoise Baligand et al, Henri-Edmond Cross (1856–1910) (Paris, 1998), 30, note 9).
He also produced books of pencil sketches and watercolors which he used to take visual notes for subsequent use in future paintings. Some of these sketchbooks retrace the artist's wanderings along the French Riviera, through Juan-les-Pins, Agay, St. Tropez, and the adjacent hills. They contain watercolor, graphite, colored pencil, and black ink studies of plants, figures, and landscapes—especially views of bays along the Mediterranean, and hills with pines. Color notations serve as prompts for the artist's visual memory, while notes on neo-impressionist theories, literature, and politics provide an insight into his preoccupations.The Harvard's Fogg Museum of Art, in Cambridge, MA, hold some of these sketchbooks, which were exhibited as part of an exhibition in 2006.
Unlike the laborious effort required to produce oil paintings in the divisionist style, in which the paint was applied in small strokes or dots, Cross found watercolor and colored pencils to be the perfect media for capturing fleeting effects. He feverishly recorded the beauty around him in the French countryside: "Oh! What I saw in a split second while riding my bike tonight! I just had to jot down these fleeting things . . . a rapid notation in watercolor and pencil: an informal daubing of contrasting colors, tones, and hues, all packed with information to make a lovely watercolor the next day in the quiet leisure of the studio."(Isabelle Compin, H. E. Cross (Paris, 1964), 69 (note 2)).
His final years, plagued by rheumatism, were spent in Saint-Clair (a district of Le Lavandou, in the French "Departement" of Var, along the Mediterranean Sea), where he died in 1910.
At end 2011 and beginning of 2012, the Musée Marmottan Monet, a Paris museum specialized in impressionist painters, organized an exhibition of Henri-Edmond Cross and related artists' works, titled "Henri Edmond Cross and Neo-Impressionism.From Seurat to Matisse". It is then scheduled to move in Cateau-Cambresis, south of Lille, the main Northern France city, as from March 2012.
This exhibition at the Musée Marmottan Monet gathers some one hundred oil paintings and watercolours from private collections and museums worldwide (Germany, Belgium, Japan, the USA…), including pivotal works in the history of Neo-impressionism, never before seen in public.It traces the evolution of the work of Henri Edmond Cross in the context of work by other members of the Neo-Impressionist movement, highlighting Cross’s network of friends, influences and followers from his Paris years with Georges Seurat, Paul Signac and the other "Neo-impressionists", to the last 20 years of his life (1892-1910), when he settled in Saint-Clair, near his friend Signac in Saint-Tropez – the rallying point for a new generation of artists, where Matisse and painters of the Fauvist style discovered and experimented with the principles of "divisionism".