La Rue Mouffetard

Maximilien Luce was a Belgian-born French painter who worked in the Neo-Impressionist or Divisionist method and combined his art with anarchist political commitments, believing in the connection between avant-garde aesthetics and social transformation. La Rue Mouffetard, painted in 1889 and now at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, depicts the famous working-class market street on Paris's Left Bank with the systematic color division of Seurat's pointillist method. The Rue Mouffetard, one of the oldest streets in Paris, was a center of popular commerce and neighborhood life that suited Luce's social-realist concerns.

Luce applies the Neo-Impressionist method of small, distinct dots or strokes of pure color that mix optically rather than physically. The street scene is built from a vibrating surface of color particles that create a flickering sense of atmospheric light appropriate to the busy market scene. His palette follows Seurat's systematic use of complementary contrast to achieve maximum chromatic luminosity.