Antibes

Antibes, painted in 1908 and now in the Museum of Grenoble, depicts the ancient coastal town on the Cap d'Antibes that had been a subject for Monet in his celebrated 1888 series and would remain a touchstone site for Mediterranean landscape painting into the twentieth century. Cross's treatment comes twenty years after Monet's, and the comparison between Monet's Impressionist treatment and Cross's Divisionist approach is instructive: both artists were committed to rendering the overwhelming intensity of southern light, but Cross's method — individual mosaic strokes of unmixed color — produces a different optical effect, building light from the relationships between colors rather than from blended atmospheric haze. By 1908 Cross was in his final years; he would die in 1910. The Grenoble museum holds several Cross works and has been an important institutional home for his late Divisionist paintings. The Antibes subject — a picturesque coastal town with Grimaldi castle and ancient walls — gave Cross a combination of landscape, architecture, and Mediterranean light.

The architectural subject of Antibes's old town and castle demanded that Cross apply his Divisionist mosaic to the planes of stone walls and angular rooflines alongside the sea and sky. The warm honey-gold of ancient Mediterranean stone contrasts with the intense blues of the sea.