Paris, église Saint-Gervais

Maximilien Luce painted this view of the church of Saint-Gervais-et-Saint-Protais in the Marais district of Paris in 1897, combining his Neo-Impressionist technique with a subject that had deep roots in the history of French painting and architecture. Saint-Gervais is one of the oldest churches in Paris, with a Gothic choir and a famous Renaissance façade, and its churchyard was the site of a devastating German shell strike during the First World War. Luce, a committed anarchist who had been imprisoned after the Commune of 1871 and later detained following the anarchist wave of the 1890s, brought a complex perspective to religious subjects: his interest was in the social and architectural fabric of working-class Paris, not devotional piety. The Musée Lambinet in Versailles holds this work. Luce's treatment of the church façade in divided colour shows how Neo-Impressionist technique could make stone and shadow as vibrant as landscape, dissolving the solid architecture into a play of light and colour touches.

Luce applies his version of divisionist colour to the stone façade, using ochres, greys, and warm tans built from adjacent pure-colour touches. Shadow areas on the architecture use cool blues and violets rather than darkened neutrals. The sky is rendered with irregular horizontal touches of blue and white that animate the space above the building.