Dormeuse nue dans la clairière

Dormeuse nue dans la clairière (Sleeping Nude in a Clearing), painted in 1907 and held at the Museum of Grenoble, places the classical subject of the reclining nude in the specific context of Cross's Var landscape — a woodland clearing of the kind he painted repeatedly in his late career. The sleeping nude in a forest clearing had a long lineage in European art, from Giorgione through Velázquez to Manet's Olympia, but Cross's treatment transforms the academic subject through Divisionist color. The warm, sunlit clearing provides the complementary contrast between flesh and landscape that Cross sought in his figure-in-landscape compositions: warm human skin against cool forest shadow, Mediterranean sun on a reclining body. The Grenoble museum's holding of this work alongside the Étude pour le Faune and the Antibes canvas constitutes an important local record of Cross's late mythological and figure subjects. By 1907 Cross was producing his most ambitious and technically mature work despite declining health.

The sleeping nude is rendered in warm divided flesh tones — ochre, pink, and peach — against the cool blue-green shadow of the surrounding forest. The reclining pose demanded careful compositional integration of the figure into the landscape clearing, Cross using the body's horizontal thrust to anchor the vertical forest masses.