Rolleboise, l'église et la maison du peintre

Rolleboise, l'église et la maison du peintre (Rolleboise, the Church and the Painter's House), painted in 1927, depicts the village and surroundings of Rolleboise on the Seine in Normandy, where Luce established his permanent home in 1906. The decision to settle in Rolleboise, a small Seine-valley village west of Mantes-la-Jolie, marked a shift in Luce's later life toward a more settled rural existence while he continued to work and exhibit in Paris. The local church and his own house — integrated into the topography of the Seine valley he had made his own — are subjects that carry genuine autobiographical meaning: this is the landscape in which he lived and worked for the last decades of his life. By 1927, Luce was in his late sixties, and his late Rolleboise paintings have a quieter, more contemplative quality than the industrial and urban works of his earlier career, though the commitment to direct observation and unidealized rendering remained constant.

The late style shows Luce working with a freer, more gestural brushwork than the neo-impressionist rigor of his early career — confident, economical strokes that capture the essential character of the village architecture and surrounding landscape without laboring the surface.