Paysage parisien. Bords de Seine

Maximilien Luce was a committed anarchist and Neo-Impressionist who divided his Pointillist technique between urban scenes of working-class Paris and landscapes of the Seine and Normandy. This Parisian riverbank view from 1901 brings together both strands: the bords de Seine in the city itself were still partly industrial, frequented by workers, bargemen, and the urban poor who lived in the dense neighborhoods of the Left Bank. Luce's political commitments gave his Seine views a different character from those of Monet or Sisley — he was interested in the river as a working environment rather than a bourgeois leisure space. The Petit Palais holds this as part of its collection of Neo-Impressionist urban landscape.

Luce applies the Pointillist mosaic of small color dots that characterizes his mature style, building the Seine's surface from adjacent touches of blue, silver, and green that merge at viewing distance into a convincing impression of moving water. The figures on the bank are rendered with the same systematic method.