Henri-Edmond Cross

French, 1856–1910

BiographyHenri-Edmond Cross (Henri-Edmond-Joseph Delacroix) was born in Douai in 1856; in 1878 he was enrolled in the Écoles Académiques de Dessin et d'Architecture in Lille. He continued his study in Paris during the early 1880s, painting rather somber Realist portraits and still lifes. In 1881, the artist adopted an Anglicized version of his surname to avoid confusion with his famous namesake, Eugène Delacroix. Cross was one of the founders of the Société des Artistes Indépendants in 1884. There he met many artists of the Neo-Impressionist movement, including Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, but did not begin painting in a Neo-Impressionist style himself until 1891. Cross moved to the south of France in 1891 and eventually settled at Saint-Clair, a small village near St. Tropez, where he lived for the rest of his life. He exhibited regularly at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, and at La Libre Esthétique in Brussels.

In works of the early 1890s, Cross's pointillist Neo-Impressionist technique is marked by a dense and highly regular placement of small dots of paint. After the mid 1890s, he gradually abandoned this minute execution in favor of larger, blocky strokes of paint, which allowed for more intense color contrasts and more decorative surfaces. Cross's late paintings were a decisive--if short-lived--influence on Henri Matisse and other Fauve artists.