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Description: 1856-1910
LA RONDE (ÉTUDE POUR LA CLAIRIÈRE)

measurements
18 1/4 by 21 5/8 in.

alternate measurements
46.4 by 55 cm

Painted circa 1906-1907.

Signed Henri Edmond Cross (lower left)

Oil on canvas

PROVENANCE

Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris
Christian Cherfils
G. Urion (sold: Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, May 30-31, 1927, lot 25)
Emile Laffargue
Hammer Galleries, New York (sold: Sotheby's, New York, November 12, 1988, lot 329)
Hilde Gerst Gallery, New York (acquired at the above sale)

EXHIBITED

Paris, Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Exposition rétrospective H.-E. Cross, 1907, no. 26 (titled Les nymphes)
Paris, Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Exposition rétrospective H.-E. Cross, 1937, no. 26 (titled Les nymphes)
Paris, Galerie Bellier, The Neo-Impressionists, 1961, no. 7

LITERATURE

Pierre Jamot, "Exposition H.E. Cross", Chronique des Arts et de la Curiosité, May 4, 1907, illustrated p. 156
Isabelle Compin, Henri Edmond Cross, Paris, 1964, no. 173, illustrated p. 274

NOTE

Painted between 1906 and 1907, the present work is a study for the painting titled La Clairière (Fig. 1) which Cross painted during the same period.

Henri-Edmond Cross moved from Paris to Le Lavandou on the Mediterranean Coast in 1891, a move which significantly affected his painting. He was inspired to adopt a brighter palette and a broader brushstroke by using vibrant and strong tones placed on the canvas in bold patterns of brushstrokes. While remaining very close to Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, with whom he had founded Neo-Impressionism, Cross abandoned their strict scientific approach to painting and adapted the pointillist style by juxtaposing small precise touches of pure color in order to attain maximum luminosity.

La ronde (Study for La Clairière) exemplifies the artist's preoccupation with female bathers in a landscape. The dreamlike figures are set in a landscape of flattened, decorative planes which suggest an ideal harmony and tranquility resulting in a utopian idyllicism rather than a sense of reality. The tonal variations and juxtapositions recreate the vibrant, dazzling atmosphere of the Côte d'Azur and recall the expressive colors of the Fauves who were working simultaneously on coastal subjects elsewhere in Southern France.

Maurice Denis, commenting on his fellow artist's work in 1907, explained Cross was "more and more substituting the play of color for the play of light...He does his utmost to imagine harmonies equivalent to sunlight, and to institute a style of pure color...Cross has resolved to represent the sun, not by bleaching his colors, but by exalting them, and by the boldness of his color contrasts... The sun is not for him a phenomenon which makes everything white, but is a source of harmony which hots up nature's colors, authorizes the most heightened color-scale, and provides the subject for all sorts of color fantasies" (Post Impressionism (exhibition catalogue), Royal Academy of Art, London, 1979, p. 61).

Fig. 1 Henri-Edmond Cross, La Clairière, 1906-1907, oil on canvas, Collection Corboud, Paris