Autoportrait

Autoportrait (1910), now in the Musée départemental Maurice-Denis at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, is a mature self-examination by Luce at age fifty. By 1910, Luce had been a central figure in Neo-Impressionist and Post-Impressionist circles for more than two decades — he was on the committee of the Salon des Indépendants and was recognized as a significant figure in the Paris avant-garde, though he maintained his political commitments and continued to produce industrial and working-class subjects alongside more conventional landscape and figure work. The Maurice-Denis museum, named for the Nabi painter and theorist who was Luce's younger contemporary, holds this work within a collection focused on Post-Impressionist art in all its variety. The 1910 self-portrait — three years before the outbreak of the First World War — shows a painter at a point of settled maturity, his technical means fully developed and his social vision undimmed.

The mature handling shows confident color modulation across the face without the schematic application of Luce's earlier divisionist period. Flesh tones are built through warm-cool variations that model form naturalistically while retaining Post-Impressionist color sensitivity.