Notre-Dame, vue du quai Saint-Michel

Maximilien Luce's 1902 view of Notre-Dame from the Quai Saint-Michel is a significant work in his series of Neo-Impressionist Paris cityscapes, bringing the pointillist technique he had developed as a follower of Seurat to one of the most celebrated views in France. Luce was an anarchist and a committed social realist who painted workers, industrial landscapes, and strike scenes alongside his urban landscapes, and his view of Notre-Dame from the Left Bank quayside is as much a document of Parisian working and bourgeois life as a celebration of the cathedral's Gothic presence. The Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne holds this as a document of French Neo-Impressionist urban painting.

The divisionist technique of the Neo-Impressionists is applied to the complex spatial and chromatic challenge of the Seine riverscape with Notre-Dame beyond — the water's reflections, the quayside plane, and the cathedral's mass each requiring a different application of the pointillist mosaic. The color temperature varies across the composition to capture the specific quality of Parisian urban light on a particular day.