Henri Edmond Cross (1856-1910)

This painting will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Henri Edmond Cross being prepared by Patrick Offenstadt.

In the space of several years, scientists Odgen Rood, Michel-Eugène Chevreul and Charles Henry each published theories of light and color in which they analyzed the differentiation between color-light and color-pigment and suggested the connection between musical theory and emotive line. Their findings provoked the interest of young artists who were frustrated by the Impressionists' approach to painting the effects of light and atmosphere. These artists in turn experimented with the scientific notion of optical mixing by creating forms out of small dots of pure pigment. Though Cross was friendly with many of the painters who comprised what came to be called the Neo-Impressionist group, he did not start painting divisionist pictures until after Georges Seurat's death in 1891 and, when he did, he quickly developed his own variant of their technique. He abandoned their use of the dot in favor of separated rectangular strokes of pure pigment that he applied not unlike the tessera in mosaics. Cross constructed his compositions with interlocking planes and careful juxtaposition of complementary colors, as with the red and green and yellow and purple tones in Pérouse, les boeufs. A letter from Cross to Paul Signac from September 1895 explained that his ultimate aim was to have "technique cede its place to sensation" (quoted in I. Compin, op. cit., p. 42).

The present canvas was unusually prized by Cross's fellow artists. When Maximilien Luce--one of whose most celebrated paintings depicts Cross (fig. 1; Bazetoux, vol. II, no. 718)--viewed Pérouse, les boeufs in April 1909, he singled it out for praise. Of the works he saw, "ma préférence irait aux Boeufs." Two years later, in an essay on "Les Indépendants" in 1911, poet-critic Guillaume Appolinaire deemed it an "un admirable poème lumineux." It was also featured in articles by Charles Angrand (1910), Lucie Cousturier, Paul Signac's artist wife (1913--as well as her 1932 monograph on the artist), and Felix Fénéon (1922). Moreover, the first private owner of the painting was Nabi painter and Edouard Vuillard's brother-in-law, Ker-Xavier Roussel, who likely acquired it directly from Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, and in whose family it remained, passing to his son, Jacques.

(fig. 1) Maximilien Luce, Portrait de Henri-Edmond Cross, 1898. Musée d'Orsay, Paris.