Autour de ma maison

Autour de ma maison (Around My House), painted in 1906 and now in Moscow's Pushkin Museum, documents the immediate environment of Cross's home in Saint-Clair sur mer on the Var coast. The subject of the artist's own domestic garden landscape carries a distinct intimacy: unlike his grand Mediterranean vistas or mythological compositions, this work records the lived daily visual world of his home. The title's first-person possessiveness ('my house') reinforces this intimacy. Cross's property at Saint-Clair, where he lived with his companion Irma Clare from 1891 until his death in 1910, was a carefully cultivated Mediterranean garden whose flowers, trees, and light provided his most immediate subjects. The Pushkin Museum's acquisition — reflecting the broad Soviet-era collecting of Western European art — brought this intimate landscape to one of Russia's great museum collections. The 1906 date places the painting in Cross's mature late phase, when his technique had evolved toward the large-stroke expressionism that influenced the young Matisse.

The domestic garden landscape demonstrates Cross's mature late technique in an intimate format — large mosaic strokes of unmixed color building the garden's vegetation with vibrant intensity rather than botanical precision. The warm Mediterranean light pervading the garden space is Cross's primary subject.