Henri-Edmond Cross

1856-1910

Henri-Edmond Cross began life in Douai in 1856 as Henri-Edmond-Joseph Delacroix, changing his name twice—first to avoid confusion with the Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix, then with a fellow artist named Henri Cros—before settling on the name under which he is known. Trained under Carolus-Duran and later in Lille and Paris, he started out painting dark-toned Realist portraits and still lifes. A meeting with Paul Signac in 1883 and involvement in the newly founded Société des Artistes Indépendants drew him toward Neo-Impressionism, which he fully embraced from 1891, the year he also settled permanently on the Mediterranean coast near Le Lavandou for his health. There he developed a personal, mosaic-like variant of divisionism, replacing tight pointillist dots with broader blocks of pure color separated by bare canvas—a manner that profoundly influenced Matisse, Derain, and Marquet and helped open the way to Fauvism. Cross exhibited regularly with the Indépendants and Les XX, held a successful solo show at Galerie Druet in 1905, and died of cancer in Le Lavandou in 1910, his health long troubled by failing eyesight and arthritis.