La Chaîne des Maures - Henri-Edmond Cross - Bemberg Fondation

La Chaîne des Maures depicts the Maures mountain range in the Var department of Provence, visible from Cross's home at Saint-Clair on the Mediterranean coast. Painted in 1906, the work belongs to his late period of expanded, freer brushwork that was already influencing the young Matisse and the Fauvists. The Maures mountains had been a subject in French landscape painting since the Romantic era, but Cross's Neo-Impressionist treatment transformed the rugged terrain into a mosaic of pure colour patches that conveys both the intense southern light and the geological character of the landscape. The Fondation Bemberg in Toulouse holds this work alongside other Cross paintings that together represent his sustained engagement with the Provençal landscape. By 1906, Cross was a recognised elder statesman of the Post-Impressionist movement, his work collected by major institutions and admired by the generation of younger painters who were taking his colour liberation further into abstraction.

The mountain landscape is built from large, mosaic-like patches of warm ochres, terracottas, blue-violets, and deep greens. The brushwork is noticeably more expressive and less systematically regular than Cross's divisionist work of the 1890s. Colour contrasts between warm rock and cool shadow are intensified beyond naturalistic observation.