La Sainte-Chapelle

Maximilien Luce painted 'La Sainte-Chapelle' in 1902, part of his series of Paris monuments treated through Neo-Impressionist pointillism. The Sainte-Chapelle, with its extraordinary Gothic stained glass, presented Luce with a subject that had been beloved by Romantic painters for its light-filled interiors, now reinterpreted through the systematic colour-division of the Divisionist method. Luce had been a close associate of Seurat and Signac, and this image demonstrates how he sustained the pointillist project into the new century after Seurat's death. The Art Institute of Chicago holds the work in its distinguished Post-Impressionist collection.

Luce applies small, regular touches of colour following Divisionist principles, allowing optical mixing at viewing distance to create the luminosity appropriate to this architecture of light. The challenge of rendering Gothic stone and coloured glass through pointillism tests the method's capacity for architectural specificity.