La plaine des Grésillons, Poissy

La plaine des Grésillons, Poissy depicts the agricultural plain near the town of Poissy on the Seine west of Paris, a landscape that Luce visited in the late 1890s as part of his practice of working outside the city in the Île-de-France region. Poissy had attracted painters since the Barbizon era, and Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists continued to find the gentle Seine valley landscapes of the region valuable working ground. Luce's rural landscapes are less discussed than his Paris street scenes and industrial subjects, but they form an important part of his output and show how divisionist colour analysis could be applied to the quiet, flat agricultural plains of northern France as successfully as to the Mediterranean. The Fondation Corboud holds this work. The Grésillons plain is unremarkable terrain — flat, agricultural, under a wide sky — and Luce treats it with the same serious attention he brought to monuments and port scenes.

The flat agricultural landscape allows Luce to work with a horizontal composition dominated by sky. Earth tones — warm browns, ochres, and muted greens — are built from adjacent colour touches. The sky, which occupies a substantial portion of the canvas, is rendered with blue, white, and grey touches that suggest cloud movement.