Beach at Cabasson (Baigne-Cul)

A broad beach runs along the foot of the picture, the sea beyond it broken into pale green and violet, and the whole shore is set under a sky of high Mediterranean light. Henri Edmond Cross painted this view at Cabasson, a hamlet on the Côte d’Azur between Toulon and Saint-Tropez, where he settled in 1891 on account of the rheumatoid arthritis that troubled him for the rest of his life. The move changed his art: on the coast he adopted the divided touch of small dashes and dots of pure colour, and the systematic tonal gradations that the Neo-Impressionists had developed out of Seurat’s example, using them to carry the colour and the heat of the region rather than to record a fleeting effect after the manner of the Impressionists. Cross (1856–1910), born at Douai and trained in Paris and Lille, became after Seurat’s death in 1891 the leading figure of the movement, and the pictures he made on the Mediterranean in the following years — beaches, bathers, pine trees in full sun — are the ones on which his reputation rests. The painting was bought by the Art Institute of Chicago in 1983. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.