Luxe, calme et volupté

1904

Oil on canvas, 98.5 × 118.5 cm. Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne, Paris (on deposit at the Musée d'Orsay)

Bathers rest and picnic on a shore beside a moored boat. It records his turn to divisionism, a method he wrote in 1905 had left him dissatisfied.

Painted in his Paris studio after a summer spent with Paul Signac at Saint-Tropez.
Look at the figures: flowing contour lines hold them, cutting across the field of dots.
Touches of nearly pure color sit side by side, unblended, over the whole canvas.
The palette already runs hot: pink, orange and yellow spread through sand, sky and bodies alike. Color chosen for intensity over accuracy is what the next year's pictures push further.
Signac bought it in 1905; his heirs kept it until it entered the national collection in 1982.

The title borrows a line from Charles Baudelaire's poem "L'Invitation au voyage," about a dreamed-of place of calm and pleasure.

Divisionism: Painting in separate small touches of pure color, meant to mix in the viewer's eye rather than on the palette.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · PD-old-70