Coast near Antibes

Coast near Antibes, painted in 1891 and now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, documents Cross's moment of Divisionist conversion. It was around 1891 that Cross abandoned his earlier naturalist approach and adopted the systematic color division that Seurat and Signac had developed in the late 1880s. This early Divisionist coastal painting thus carries particular historical importance: it shows the method being applied freshly, the artist still working out how to deploy divided color in the specific conditions of the Mediterranean coast. Cross had settled in Saint-Clair on the Var coast in 1891, and the Antibes area — further east along the Riviera — was a natural subject for a painter newly committed to capturing southern Mediterranean light. The National Gallery of Art's holding of this transitional work positions it as a document of a key moment in Post-Impressionism's development, when the systematic application of color theory to the specific conditions of southern French landscape was being worked out by Cross and Signac in parallel.

The early Divisionist technique shows Cross still developing his method — the stroke is smaller and more regular than his later work, closer to the Pointillist system of Seurat. The coastal subject provided ideal conditions for testing the technique's capacity to render sea-light.