Maximilien Luce

MAXIMILIEN LUCE

1858 - Paris - 1941

Maximilien Luce was a pupil of Carolus-Duran in the 1880s.  Following a visit to London in 1887, where he worked for the Graphic, he became friends with Camille Pissarro, Paul Signac and Georges Seurat, adopting the Divisionist style of Neo-Impressionism, though never using the Pointillist technique as systematically as the others. He exhibited regularly at the Salon des Indépendants and became its President in 1935.

Trips to Belgium, beginning in 1895, led Luce to focus specifically on industrial landscape, and he became a member of the Brussels Groupe des XX.  These scenes from the lives of factory workers and miners were strongly related to Luce’s anarchistic political allegiances, which come out particularly in his lithographs for socialist magazines of the time.

Later Luce reverted to a more decorative and luminous version of Neo-Impressionism, popularising divisionism outside France.  In the finest of his canvases the choice of landscapes and the use of dabs of colour and soft atmospheric blues reveal Luce’s debt to Impressionism.