Kap Layet

Kap Layet, dated around 1883 and now in Munich's Bavarian State Painting Collections, was painted during Henri-Edmond Cross's early career, before his conversion to Divisionism. In 1883 Cross — born Henri Delacroix and adopting his mother's English surname to avoid confusion with Eugène Delacroix — was working in a naturalist mode influenced by the Impressionists, particularly Monet. He had begun exhibiting at the Salon des Indépendants, the non-juried exhibition that would become central to the development of Post-Impressionism. Kap Layet (Cape Layet) is a coastal site on the Var coast near Hyères, a region Cross would later make his permanent home. The early date of this landscape shows him already drawn to the Mediterranean coast that would define his mature art, but rendering it with a tonal naturalism that would undergo radical revision when he encountered Seurat's systematic color theory around 1891. The Munich Pinakothek's acquisition reflects broad German collecting of French Post-Impressionist works.

The early naturalist technique employs fluid, directional brushwork and a relatively tonal palette that distinguishes this work sharply from the divided-color Divisionism of his mature period. The coastal subject is rendered with atmospheric Impressionist looseness.