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Dimensions: 65.5 by 92cm., 25 3/4 by 36 1/4 in.
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Provenance: Ambroise Vollard, Paris (acquired directly from the artist in May 1901)
Sale: Christie's, London, 29th June 1992, lot 15
Galerie Felix Vercel, Paris
Acquired from the above by the present owner in October 1999
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Exhibited:
(probably) Paris, Galerie Charpentier, Beautés de la Provence, 1947, no. 30
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Literature: Isabelle Compin, H. E. Cross, Paris, 1964, no. 50, listed p. 139
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Notes: To be included in the forthcoming Henri-Edmond Cross Catalogue raisonné being prepared by Monsieur Patrick Offenstadt.
PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION
La Lavandière is a work that reveals the conflicting demands of Cross's Anarchist Utopian ideals and the Arcadian aesthetic vision that increasingly inspired his landscapes. Anarchist beliefs were central the subject matter of the Neo-Impressionist movement during this period; a year earlier Signac had painted his In a Time of Harmony, the most important pictorial statement of his beliefs showing agrarian workers in a utopian coastal setting. Cross had also often depicted this slightly improbable subject, but around the time the present work was painted he increasingly turned towards the nude as a subject. As he was later to comment, 'A long time ago, I discovered my insensitivity to the peasant. I find him here [in the south] especially without plastic interest, and I would not know how to paint him... On the rocks, on the sand of the beaches, nymphs and naiads appear to me, a whole world born of beautiful light' (Cross quoted in Neo-Impressionism (exhibition catalogue), Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1968, p. 47). In the present work, the figure of the washer woman has already begun to assume the graceful pose of one of his nudes, and the reality of her occupation and social status is subsumed by the Arcadian air of the work. It was this atmosphere of bucolic serenity, a product of the rich colour harmonies that underpinned Cross's work, that was to prove very influential on a later generation of painters, most significantly Matisse, whose Luxe, calme, et volupté was conceived whilst working with Cross and Signac in the south in 1904.
