Bathing Women (L'heure embrasée)

Subtitled 'L'heure embrasée' — the blazing hour — this 1897 bathing scene now at the Neues Museum Weimar captures the intense Mediterranean light that Van Rysselberghe encountered during summers in the south of France. The late 1890s represented the apex of his orthodox Neo-Impressionist work: fully committed to the divided-touch technique he had absorbed from Seurat and Signac, he applied it to the nude in outdoor light, a subject that tested the method's capacity to render warm flesh tones against water and sky. Bathing women were a recurring motif for the Belgian painter, allowing him to reconcile academic figure painting with the radical formal language of divisionism. The work entered the Weimar collection, reflecting the strong German market for French and Belgian avant-garde painting that developed through dealer networks in the 1890s and early 1900s. 'L'heure embrasée' captures that liminal moment when afternoon sun flattens onto the water's surface, and Van Rysselberghe uses this optical event as both subject and pretext for sustained chromatic experimentation.

Oil on canvas built entirely from separated dots of pigment. Flesh tones are constructed from warm oranges and pinks set against cool blue-green notes to suggest the effect of sunlight filtered through water and air. The water surface is rendered in horizontal bands of complementary hues, and the high colour saturation throughout reflects the painter's strict divisionist orthodoxy.