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Maximilien Luce

( 1858 – 1941 )

“Rolleboise”

Medium	Oil on panel
Signed	Signed lower left
Size	9.50" × 14.00" (24.1cm × 35.6cm)
Framed Size	15.50" × 20.00" (39.4cm × 50.8cm)
Dated	c. 1917
Condition	Very good condition for age
Provenance	The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Mme. Denise Bazetoux and is recorded in her archives for inclusion in Tome IV of the catalogue raisonne

Summary

1917 is the year Maximilien Luce discovered Rolleboise. He came to this quiet village on a bend of the Seine between Paris and Rouen during the darkest years of the First World War, and what he found there — the river light, the Norman countryside, the unhurried pace of life along the water — gave him something the city could no longer offer. He bought a house there in 1920 and was buried there in 1941. A canvas of 1917 may be among the very first paintings he made in the place that would define the final chapter of his career. The handling reflects the liberation that Rolleboise represented. By 1917 Luce had long since moved beyond the strict Pointillist discipline he had developed alongside Seurat and Signac — the precisely placed dots of pure colour — into something freer and more instinctive. The Seine at Rolleboise demanded exactly this approach: the movement of water, the shifting Norman sky, the particular luminosity of the riverbank required a painter willing to follow the motif rather than impose a system upon it. The colour is direct, the observation acute, the mark-making executed with the confidence of a painter who has spent thirty years learning to see. Félix Fénéon, the great critic of the Neo-Impressionist movement, characterised Luce as "a coarse, honest man with a rough and muscular talent" — and the description fits both the man and this painting precisely. The Musée d'Orsay assessed Luce as one of the finest representatives of the Neo-Impressionist movement and held a major retrospective of his work in 2010. His paintings are held in the Musée d'Orsay, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Tate in London. He was elected president of the Société des Artistes Indépendants in 1935, resigning in 1940 in protest at the Vichy regime's exclusion of Jewish artists — a measure of the man as much as the painter.

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Maximilien Luce

Maximilien-Jules-Constant Luce was born on 13 March 1858 in Paris. His parents, of modest means, were Charles-Désiré Luce (1823–1888), a railway clerk, and Louise-Joséphine Dunas (1822–1878). The family lived in the Montparnasse, a working-class district of Paris. Luce attended school at l'Ecole communale, beginning in…

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