Village au bord d'une rivière

Village au bord d'une rivière — village on a riverbank — shows Luce applying his Neo-Impressionist Pointillist method to a more pastoral subject than his Parisian urban scenes, depicting the quiet life of a French village beside a slow river. Luce made numerous trips out of Paris to paint the river landscapes of Normandy and the Île-de-France, and these village and riverside subjects gave him material where his commitment to divided color could be fully explored without the documentary demands of his urban and industrial scenes. The subject — a modest village, a reflective river, ordinary afternoon light — is conspicuously unpretentious, consistent with Luce's anarchist rejection of heroic or monumental subject matter. The Petit Palais holds this alongside his more politically charged urban works.

Luce applies Pointillist dots in the middle ground and sky while using slightly larger, more gestural strokes in the water reflections, a pragmatic adaptation of his systematic method to the varying textures of the scene. The palette is warmer and more varied than his Parisian scenes, with the village buildings providing ochre and warm grey against the landscape's greens.