Mantes, bords de Seine

Mantes, bords de Seine (1905) depicts the banks of the Seine at Mantes-la-Jolie, a town some fifty kilometers west of Paris that had been a beloved subject of landscape painters since Corot's celebrated series of views there in the mid-nineteenth century. By visiting Mantes in 1905, Luce was consciously engaging with a landscape freighted with art-historical precedent — Corot's misty, silvery canvases of the town and its Gothic church were among the most admired French landscape paintings of the nineteenth century. Luce's response is characteristically more direct and coloristically assertive, bringing Neo-Impressionist color analysis to bear on a subject Corot had treated with atmospheric, tonal softness. The Seine riverbank also offered Luce his preferred combination of landscape and human activity — barges, washerwomen, fishermen, the working life of the river — which satisfied both his aesthetic and political interests. The 1905 date places this work in a period when Luce was traveling regularly along the Seine valley, producing a sequence of river paintings that constitute a significant portion of his mature landscape oeuvre.

Luce's mature river painting shows confident handling of water reflections, with horizontal strokes of varied color capturing the shimmer and movement of the Seine surface. Foliage along the bank is treated with animated, multidirectional strokes that create a sense of rustling life.