Valley with Fir (Shade on the Mountain)

Valley with Fir (Shade on the Mountain), painted in 1909 and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is a late landscape from Cross's final year of significant productivity — he died in 1910. The subject of a mountain valley with fir trees moves Cross away from his characteristic Var coastal scenery toward the more rugged, vertical landscape of the French interior. The painting's alternative title 'Shade on the Mountain' suggests its primary subject is the play of light and shadow across a landscape rather than any particular geographic documentation. By 1909 Cross's Divisionist technique had evolved as far as it would go, employing large, broad strokes of intense color that verge on the purely abstract. The Metropolitan's holding of this late work alongside Pines Along the Shore (1896) provides a span of Cross's career from mature Divisionism to late expressionist intensity. The mountain-valley subject demanded careful management of complementary warm and cool zones — sunlit slopes against shadowed fir-covered valley floors.

The late technique deploys very broad mosaic strokes of intense color — firs in deep blue-green, sunlit slopes in ochre and yellow — that push the Divisionist mosaic toward an expressionistic abstraction. Individual marks are large and visible, building the mountain landscape from pure color architecture.