Henri-Edmond Cross

Next to Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, Henri-Edmond Cross is considered the most important representative of French Neo-Impressionism. The painting Bullfight, created around 1891–92, is one of his first works in the Pointillist style—a technique in which the surface of the painting is divided into numerous tiny dots of unmixed color. The scene shows the Gran Plaza de Toros, an arena constructed in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris for the 1889 World’s Fair. Cross was primarily a landscape painter, and this unusual choice of an urban motif was influenced by Georges Seurat’s stage scenes such as The Circus (1890–91, Musée d’Orsay, Paris), which Cross had seen at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris in 1891. The use of bright, pure colors, the fine mosaic structure, and the skillful combination of extreme close-up and distant views are borrowed from Seurat, whose time-consuming technique of Divisionism was embraced by Cross through to the mid-1890s. In 1892 Cross entered the work in the Salon des Indépendants, where it was intended to serve as a public homage to Seurat, who had died the previous year. After Seurat’s death, Cross and Signac became the leading figures of the Neo-Impressionist avant-garde.

A study associated with the painting Bullfight is among the few watercolors Cross painted in the Pointillist style and is also part of the Hasso Plattner Collection.

Daniel Zamani