Afternoon in the Garden

Afternoon in the Garden from 1904 shows Cross at his most lyrical, painting a Mediterranean garden in the full intensity of summer light. Cross's Saint-Clair property gave him direct daily access to a garden subject, and he returned to it repeatedly through the decade. The Städel Museum in Frankfurt holds this work. By 1904 Cross's Neo-Impressionism had absorbed some of the decorative freedom of Art Nouveau, and his gardens begin to feel like organized fantasies of color rather than systematic records of optical phenomena.

The garden is organized through alternating passages of warm sunlit ground and cooler shadow, achieved through systematic complementary contrasts of orange-blue and yellow-violet. Floral forms in the foreground are suggested through loose clusters of varied colored touches rather than individual petal description.