Le port de Londres, la nuit

Le port de Londres, la nuit (The Port of London, at Night), painted in 1894 and held in the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, is one of Luce's most important nocturnal industrial subjects. In 1894, Luce visited London — the world's largest city and the center of the British Empire, whose port handled the greatest volume of commercial shipping in the world. The Thames at night, with its complex overlay of gas lamps, ship lights, warehouses, and the silhouettes of masts and cranes against a smudged, luminous sky, was a visual environment of extraordinary intensity. Luce was drawn to it for the same reasons he was drawn to Charleroi and Rotterdam: the night port concentrated, in highly visible form, the human and industrial reality of global commerce, with dockworkers laboring in difficult conditions amid vast machinery. The High Museum holds this work as part of its significant collection of French Post-Impressionist paintings. The 1894 date also gives this work biographical significance: that same year, Luce was arrested in Paris following the anarchist bombing campaigns, making the London visit and this painting a moment of creative work amid political crisis.

The nocturnal Thames is treated through a stark palette of near-blacks and deep blues punctuated by intense warm passages of gaslight and ship lanterns reflecting on water. Masts, cranes, and warehouse forms are silhouetted against a smoky, light-polluted sky.