Valley with Fir (Shade on the Mountain)

Henri-Edmond Cross was a practitioner of the Neoimpressionist style of painting, a short-lived avantgarde movement in the late nineteenth century which emphasized the use of separate touches of interwoven pigment to achieve greater vibrancy of color in the observer’s eye. Cross executed this landscape with a palette of contrasting hues, employing a technique that he adapted from Georges Seurat earlier in his career. Strokes of paint are layered across the canvas in varying density, while also leaving areas of primed ground exposed in the foreground and at the left side of the composition. The effect of Cross’s playful variation in brushwork is decorative as it draws attention to the flat, patterned designs of color strokes.