Notre Dame

Luce's 'Notre Dame,' painted around 1900, is one of several Paris landmarks he treated through his Divisionist method—applying the pointillist technique to buildings that had long served as subjects for painters seeking to demonstrate their command of Parisian light and space. Notre-Dame's cathedral mass, rising from the Île de la Cité above the Seine, offered Luce the combination of architectural solidity and atmospheric light that suited Divisionism's twin strengths. The San Diego Museum of Art holds this Paris view in its American collection of French Post-Impressionism.

Luce builds the cathedral's grey stone and the surrounding Seine through accumulated colour dots—the pointillist method captures the way daylight breaks into component colours across a complex architectural surface. The reflections in the Seine water below provide an additional optical layer for his systematic colour analysis.