Henri-Edmond Cross Giclée Fine Art Prints
1856-1910
French Painter - Pointillism, Post-Impressionism
Henri-Edmond Cross (1856-1910) was a French painter and printmaker and one of the central figures of Neo-Impressionism, known for sunlit views of the Provençal coast built up from separate touches of pure color. The looser manner of his final years gave Henri Matisse and the future Fauves a decisive push.
He was born Henri-Edmond-Joseph Delacroix on 20 May 1856 in Douai, in northern France, where the family kept an ironmonger's shop in the rue Jean-Bellegambe. His father, Alcide, was a Frenchman with an adventurous streak. His mother, Fanny Woollett, was English. No brother or sister survived. In 1865 the family moved to the outskirts of Lille. A cousin of his father's, the physician Auguste Soins, noticed the boy's gift, became his mentor and paid for his first drawing lessons. In Lille he was taught by Carolus-Duran, and in 1875 he spent a short time in Paris with François Bonvin. Back in Lille he entered the Écoles Académiques de Dessin et d'Architecture in 1878 and worked for three years in the studio of Alphonse Colas. After settling in Paris in 1881 he continued his training under Émile Dupont-Zipcy, a painter from his home town.
That same year he made his debut at the Salon des Artistes Français, already under a new name. To avoid being confused with Eugène Delacroix, he put his surname into English (croix is French for cross), reportedly at Bonvin's suggestion. Around 1886 he adjusted it again, adding his second given name, because a Henri Cros was also active in Paris. His early portraits and still lifes kept to the dark tones of Realism. In 1883 he traveled with his family to the Alpes-Maritimes and painted many landscapes. Dr. Soins came along and sat for a portrait that Cross showed at an exhibition in Nice later that year. The very large Jardin de roses à Monaco of 1884, now in Douai, belongs to this period.
In 1884 Cross was among the founders of the Société des Artistes Indépendants, whose exhibitions had neither jury nor prizes and were meant as an alternative to the official Salon. Through it he came to know Georges Seurat, Albert Dubois-Pillet and Charles Angrand. Paul Signac became his closest friend. Yet for years Cross kept his distance from their method. He looked instead at Jules Bastien-Lepage, Édouard Manet and the Impressionists, lightened his palette and worked outdoors. In the later 1880s he painted landscapes in the spirit of Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro.
The turn came in 1891, the year of Seurat's death. At the Indépendants Cross showed his first large divisionist canvas, a portrait of Irma Clare, an Englishwoman of great beauty whom he had met in 1888. Divorced from the writer Hector France, she married Cross in 1893. The historian Robert Rosenblum later admired the soft, grainy light that seems to fill the air of this picture, which now hangs in the Musée d'Orsay. Also in 1891, rheumatism drove Cross to leave Paris for good. He had been coming south regularly since 1883. Now he lived first at Cabasson near Le Lavandou, then in the nearby hamlet of Saint-Clair, which he left only for journeys to Italy in 1903 and 1908 and for the yearly Indépendants in Paris. In 1892 Signac settled a short distance away in Saint-Tropez.
Like Signac and Pissarro, Cross was an anarchist, and his politics shaped his subjects. In a letter to Signac he explained that he wanted to paint happiness: the contented people humanity would become in a few centuries, once pure anarchy had been achieved. Bathers on secluded shores, nymphs, and peasants at work in fields and vineyards fill his canvases. From 1896 he gave drawings and lithographs to Jean Grave's anarchist paper Les Temps Nouveaux, beginning with the unsigned L'Errant (The Wanderer), and donated watercolors to the lotteries that supported it. Other prints followed: an illustration for John-Antoine Nau's novel La Gennia, and two color lithographs, La Promenade, issued by Ambroise Vollard in 1897, and Les Champs-Élysées, published in the magazine Pan in 1898.
Setting down countless dots was slow work, so Cross kept a quicker medium for fleeting impressions. He filled sketchbooks with watercolor and colored pencil. Once, he wrote, something he glimpsed for an instant while cycling one evening had to be caught at once in a few contrasting patches, to be worked into a proper watercolor the next day in the quiet of the studio. On canvas his touch changed as well. Until the mid-1890s he placed tiny dots close together in regular order. From about 1895 the strokes grew broad and blocky, with small gaps of bare canvas left between them, so that the surfaces resemble mosaic. Instead of letting colors merge in the eye, he now kept them apart so that they would vibrate against each other. The Neo-Impressionists, he said, cared more about harmonies of pure color than about rendering the colors of a particular landscape.
Younger painters, among them Matisse, André Derain and Albert Marquet, gathered with Signac in Cross's garden at Saint-Clair. Matisse spent the summer of 1904 in Saint-Tropez, and his Luxe, Calme et Volupté followed directly from these encounters. Henri Manguin, Charles Camoin, Jean Puy and Louis Valtat also learned from Cross's late work. Recognition grew steadily. Octave Maus invited him to Les XX in Brussels and repeatedly to La Libre Esthétique from 1895 on. In 1898 Cross, Signac, Maximilien Luce and Théo van Rysselberghe made up the first Neo-Impressionist exhibition in Germany, organized by Harry Kessler in Berlin. His first solo show, at the Galerie Druet in Paris in 1905, brought together thirty paintings and thirty watercolors, and most of them sold. In the catalogue the Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren praised the lyrical feeling of the landscapes and their abundance, which in his view never turned into excess. In 1907 Félix Fénéon arranged a retrospective at Bernheim-Jeune, with a preface by Maurice Denis.
Illness accompanied this success. Eye trouble had begun in the early 1880s and grew worse after 1900, and arthritis increasingly hampered him, which is one reason his output remained fairly small. His last years were nonetheless productive. In 1909 he was treated for cancer in a Paris hospital. In January 1910 he went home to Saint-Clair, where he died on 16 May 1910, four days before his fifty-fourth birthday. He is buried in the cemetery of Le Lavandou, beneath a bronze medallion made by his friend van Rysselberghe. Angrand and Luce, who painted his portrait, were his other close companions.
Douai honored him with a retrospective in July 1911. Today the Musée d'Orsay holds L'Air du soir, La Chevelure and Les Cyprès à Cagnes, and the Musée de la Chartreuse in Douai keeps works from every stage of his career. His pictures also hang in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum. The 2018 exhibition at Giverny and Potsdam took its title, Peindre le bonheur, from his own stated aim.
He was born Henri-Edmond-Joseph Delacroix on 20 May 1856 in Douai, in northern France, where the family kept an ironmonger's shop in the rue Jean-Bellegambe. His father, Alcide, was a Frenchman with an adventurous streak. His mother, Fanny Woollett, was English. No brother or sister survived. In 1865 the family moved to the outskirts of Lille. A cousin of his father's, the physician Auguste Soins, noticed the boy's gift, became his mentor and paid for his first drawing lessons. In Lille he was taught by Carolus-Duran, and in 1875 he spent a short time in Paris with François Bonvin. Back in Lille he entered the Écoles Académiques de Dessin et d'Architecture in 1878 and worked for three years in the studio of Alphonse Colas. After settling in Paris in 1881 he continued his training under Émile Dupont-Zipcy, a painter from his home town.
That same year he made his debut at the Salon des Artistes Français, already under a new name. To avoid being confused with Eugène Delacroix, he put his surname into English (croix is French for cross), reportedly at Bonvin's suggestion. Around 1886 he adjusted it again, adding his second given name, because a Henri Cros was also active in Paris. His early portraits and still lifes kept to the dark tones of Realism. In 1883 he traveled with his family to the Alpes-Maritimes and painted many landscapes. Dr. Soins came along and sat for a portrait that Cross showed at an exhibition in Nice later that year. The very large Jardin de roses à Monaco of 1884, now in Douai, belongs to this period.
In 1884 Cross was among the founders of the Société des Artistes Indépendants, whose exhibitions had neither jury nor prizes and were meant as an alternative to the official Salon. Through it he came to know Georges Seurat, Albert Dubois-Pillet and Charles Angrand. Paul Signac became his closest friend. Yet for years Cross kept his distance from their method. He looked instead at Jules Bastien-Lepage, Édouard Manet and the Impressionists, lightened his palette and worked outdoors. In the later 1880s he painted landscapes in the spirit of Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro.
The turn came in 1891, the year of Seurat's death. At the Indépendants Cross showed his first large divisionist canvas, a portrait of Irma Clare, an Englishwoman of great beauty whom he had met in 1888. Divorced from the writer Hector France, she married Cross in 1893. The historian Robert Rosenblum later admired the soft, grainy light that seems to fill the air of this picture, which now hangs in the Musée d'Orsay. Also in 1891, rheumatism drove Cross to leave Paris for good. He had been coming south regularly since 1883. Now he lived first at Cabasson near Le Lavandou, then in the nearby hamlet of Saint-Clair, which he left only for journeys to Italy in 1903 and 1908 and for the yearly Indépendants in Paris. In 1892 Signac settled a short distance away in Saint-Tropez.
Like Signac and Pissarro, Cross was an anarchist, and his politics shaped his subjects. In a letter to Signac he explained that he wanted to paint happiness: the contented people humanity would become in a few centuries, once pure anarchy had been achieved. Bathers on secluded shores, nymphs, and peasants at work in fields and vineyards fill his canvases. From 1896 he gave drawings and lithographs to Jean Grave's anarchist paper Les Temps Nouveaux, beginning with the unsigned L'Errant (The Wanderer), and donated watercolors to the lotteries that supported it. Other prints followed: an illustration for John-Antoine Nau's novel La Gennia, and two color lithographs, La Promenade, issued by Ambroise Vollard in 1897, and Les Champs-Élysées, published in the magazine Pan in 1898.
Setting down countless dots was slow work, so Cross kept a quicker medium for fleeting impressions. He filled sketchbooks with watercolor and colored pencil. Once, he wrote, something he glimpsed for an instant while cycling one evening had to be caught at once in a few contrasting patches, to be worked into a proper watercolor the next day in the quiet of the studio. On canvas his touch changed as well. Until the mid-1890s he placed tiny dots close together in regular order. From about 1895 the strokes grew broad and blocky, with small gaps of bare canvas left between them, so that the surfaces resemble mosaic. Instead of letting colors merge in the eye, he now kept them apart so that they would vibrate against each other. The Neo-Impressionists, he said, cared more about harmonies of pure color than about rendering the colors of a particular landscape.
Younger painters, among them Matisse, André Derain and Albert Marquet, gathered with Signac in Cross's garden at Saint-Clair. Matisse spent the summer of 1904 in Saint-Tropez, and his Luxe, Calme et Volupté followed directly from these encounters. Henri Manguin, Charles Camoin, Jean Puy and Louis Valtat also learned from Cross's late work. Recognition grew steadily. Octave Maus invited him to Les XX in Brussels and repeatedly to La Libre Esthétique from 1895 on. In 1898 Cross, Signac, Maximilien Luce and Théo van Rysselberghe made up the first Neo-Impressionist exhibition in Germany, organized by Harry Kessler in Berlin. His first solo show, at the Galerie Druet in Paris in 1905, brought together thirty paintings and thirty watercolors, and most of them sold. In the catalogue the Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren praised the lyrical feeling of the landscapes and their abundance, which in his view never turned into excess. In 1907 Félix Fénéon arranged a retrospective at Bernheim-Jeune, with a preface by Maurice Denis.
Illness accompanied this success. Eye trouble had begun in the early 1880s and grew worse after 1900, and arthritis increasingly hampered him, which is one reason his output remained fairly small. His last years were nonetheless productive. In 1909 he was treated for cancer in a Paris hospital. In January 1910 he went home to Saint-Clair, where he died on 16 May 1910, four days before his fifty-fourth birthday. He is buried in the cemetery of Le Lavandou, beneath a bronze medallion made by his friend van Rysselberghe. Angrand and Luce, who painted his portrait, were his other close companions.
Douai honored him with a retrospective in July 1911. Today the Musée d'Orsay holds L'Air du soir, La Chevelure and Les Cyprès à Cagnes, and the Musée de la Chartreuse in Douai keeps works from every stage of his career. His pictures also hang in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum. The 2018 exhibition at Giverny and Potsdam took its title, Peindre le bonheur, from his own stated aim.