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Description: le puy: la place ensoleillee signed oil on canvas 82.5 by 61 cm., 32 1/2 by 24 in. Painted circa 1889-90. Provenance: Mme. Audiard, Le Puy Sale: Galliera, Paris, 10th December 1966 Stephen Higgons, Paris Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1967 Literature: Lily Bazalgette, Albert Dubois-Pillet, sa vie et son oeuvre (1846-1890), Paris, 1976, p. 149, mentioned John Rewald, Post-Impressionism from Van Gogh to Gauguin, London, 1978, p. 124, illustrated Louis Auguste Albert Dubois joined the army in 1865 and after participating in the suppression of Paris in 1871, advanced rapidly to the rank of Captain. He began to paint in the 1870s and after having his paintings rejected by the Salon in the early 1880s, he helped form the artists' group, Les Independents, in 1884 to provide an alternative venue for the exhibition of his work. Adopting the name Dubois-Pillet to distinguish his art from his continuing career in the military, he exhibited at the Salon des Independents where he met Seurat, Angrand, Cross and Signac, advocates of divisionism, a method Dubois-Pillet adopted according to his own theoretical perspective in 1886. Strongly influenced by Seurat's web of equally sized strokes of paint, Dubois-Pillet added his own ideas on relationships of colour in the divisionist brushstroke. 'In his theories of colour Dubois-Pillet advocated the introduction of ''passages,'' to express the presence, in every colour, of elements from the other parts of the spectrum - in addition to the basic elements normally studied by the Neo-Impressionists (local colour, lighting, reflections, and induced complementary colours); this seems to increase the colour-rhymes in his pictures which link each area to the other.' (Edited by John House and Mary Anne Stevens, Post-Impressionism, London, 1979, p. 70) In November 1889, Dubois-Pillet was sent to take charge of the military squadron stationed at Puy-en-Velay. There he painted only three paintings, including the present work, before succumbing to an epidemic in August of 1890, from which he died at the age of 43. A latter-day photograph of the square at Le Puy (fig. 1) shows the site to be relatively unchanged since 1890 with the cross dominating the area. In the present work, Dubois-Pillet adopted a high perspective. The cross looms above the people and buildings of the town, but is compositionally contained by the line of cliffs to the left. By so doing, Dubois-Pillet uses the cross as a transition from ground to buildings to sky to rocks, with the cross and its base acting as a formal illustration of the artist's theory of the 'passage.' The single line of red and blue strokes that make up the lines of the cross, in other words, connect the blue of the sky to the orange-reds of the cliffs, just as the complex colours of the base link the ground to the buildings and then to the clouds. Throughout, of course, the carefully matched strokes describe the bright light of mid-day, as Bazalgette writes of this work 'la tout traite en une luminosite douce.' (Lily Bazalgette, op.cit., p. 149).