The Return of the Fisherman

In this painting, the changeability and luminosity of the dying sun on the French Mediterranean coast is brilliantly depicted by Henri-Edmond Cross, a Neo-Impressionist painter whose divisionist style recalls works by his better-known compatriots Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. As a young painter, Cross favored darker, more somber colors, but after contact with Impressionist artists, his palette changed to lighter, brighter tones.

The Return of the Fisherman depicts a rocky inlet close by the village of Saint- Clair, where Cross made his home, near Saint-Tropez; here, the surf rolls in, bashing against the line of rocky outcroppings known as "Les Baleines" ("The Whales"), and sends up a plume of spray, as seen in the background at the far left of the canvas. A barefoot man, carrying a large jug on his shoulder, strides forward, and further along the winding path, two small figures make their way homeward. The clouds are backlit by the sun, which has fallen below the cliff, encircling it in a brilliant line of brightness. At the upper left, small blue strokes of paint begin to invade the canvas, heralding the coming dusk. Two drawings for the work are known, and Cross included a small color sketch of it in a letter he wrote to Signac in the fall of 1896.

The year after it was made, Oberlin's painting was shown at an exhibition of the Société des Artistes Indépendants (a group Cross helped found along with Seurat and Signac in 1884) in Paris. The painting was in the sale of Cross's effects held in 1921, and was subsequently in the collection of Cross's friend, the artist Maximilien Luce, until his death in 1941, when it passed to that of his son Frédéric Luce.