La rue Réaumur

La rue Réaumur shows the rue de Réaumur in Paris, a major commercial street in the 2nd arrondissement that was widened and rebuilt in the 1890s as part of the urban modernization program that continued Haussmann's transformation of the capital. Luce painted this in 1896, exactly when the street was attracting attention as a symbol of modern Paris — its new buildings with their iron-framed, glass-fronted commerce represented a vision of capitalist modernity that Luce, as an anarchist, viewed with critical ambivalence. His Neo-Impressionist treatment — applying divisionist colour to the mechanical, industrialised urban environment — was itself politically charged: Seurat had pioneered the technique partly to explore whether a scientific approach to painting could be progressive. Luce's Paris street scenes, which he returned to throughout his career, combine the formal analysis of light with an implicit social reading of working-class and commercial urban life.

Luce adapts divisionist technique to an urban scene dominated by architecture and artificial light. The palette is cooler and more varied in its greys than his outdoor subjects, using blue, violet, and silver touches alongside ochres to describe the city's reflective surfaces. Human figures are abbreviated into gestural colour marks.