Introduction

The tourist and the invalid, both seeking the sun and warm nature, today stop struck in admiration before all these southern marvels, the one to be inspired by this source of poetry and grandeur, the other to breathe health and life amid this promised land, under constant blue skies. Where indeed can you find hospitality at once compatible with both art and health?

– J. B. Girard, Cannes et ses environs, 1859[1]

As early as 1859, the tourist-writer J. B. Girard characterized France's Mediterranean coast as the unique meeting point of the aesthetic and the therapeutic. Girard emphasized that the appeal of towns like Cannes for the artist and the invalid[2] was not to be located in its glamorous ballrooms or casinos, but rather in its natural grandeur. By 1887, when the poet Stéphen Liégeard named the region "la Côte d'Azur,"[3] he did so using a well-established aesthetic framework; this was a landscape of color: an azure-colored coastline.[4] In 1964, the art historian Pierre Cabanne described the region as not simply beautiful for the visitor but transformative for the artist's aesthetic sensibilities:

For some, the South of France represents a welcoming climate, a form of pleasant existence among landscapes that one customarily calls divine and that, moreover, they are; the mildness of the atmosphere, the beauty of the sites, the purity of the sky have made the Côte d'Azur a kind of privileged stay, an exceptional place of nature. For others, it has transformed their vision; the primacy of light and of form on colors has rendered the painter more attentive to structure, to the morphology of things.[5]

What emerges from Girard's and Cabanne's statements is a sustained and normalized belief, spanning over a hundred years, in the transformative powers of the Côte d'Azur on the bodies and minds of artists and invalids, two forms of tourists. This article explores shared aesthetic and therapeutic perceptions of this region during the fin-de-siècle, approaching them through a case study of the neo-impressionist artist and chronic arthritic, Henri-Edmond Cross (1856–1910). Like Eugène Boudin (1824–98), Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), and Louis Valtat (1869–1952), he was one of several vanguard artists of the late nineteenth-century who travelled south, to France's Mediterranean coast, for his health.[6] Cross settled permanently on the Côte d'Azur from 1891 until his death in 1910, and those two decades are crucial for the few art historians who have approached his oeuvre.[7] The year 1891 marked both his move to the Maures region of the coast, a choice made for reasons of health, and his conversion to neo-impressionism.[8] Cross, like Renoir, has been discussed in art-historical literature as both a modern artist and a chronic arthritic living on the coast. Those two categories have been perpetuated throughout his historiography as fundamentally intertwined, and Cross has been described as a painter suffering for his art in the face of physical anguish—a narrative of "triumph over adversity."[9] With Cross, indeed through Cross, I offer a new, alternative history of the Côte d'Azur approached through the body of the French artist-invalid, accessed through his perspectives, practices, and representations.[10]

Through texts and images, this article analyzes Cross's life on the Côte d'Azur as a case study, not a lionizing biography, bound to contemporaneous medico-geographical perceptions of the transformative or "imprinting" power of southern climates on northern bodies, especially those with an illness or of delicate constitution. Paintings of the last five years of Cross's life, exemplified by representations of female nudes set within the artist's immediate surroundings, stand as metaphor, product and producer of such perceptions. This article is heavily concerned with primary and secondary sources concerning Cross's biography, medical literature, and invalid perceptions of place, exploring their words and meanings. By doing so, I seek to provide a new, medical lens through which to contextualize the historical significance of the Côte d'Azur during the fin-de-siècle for its visiting artists and invalids.

Imprints
Perceptions that climate has a direct influence on bodies are of ancient, Hippocratic origin. If we look to medical geography of the nineteenth century, the relationship between body and place becomes particularly well-defined. Texts during the period by physicians and geographers explained that climate had a profound, transformative power over the body's development, manners, well-being, and thoughts. To put it simply, they believed that the body was quite literally imprinted by the environment it inhabited.[11] In a work of 1843, J. C. M. Boudin wrote, "medical geography has as its object the knowledge of modifications imprinted on the organism by the influence of climates, and the study of laws presiding over the distribution of illnesses throughout the diverse parts of the globe."[12] Earlier, in 1821, François Foderé viewed the appearance, temperament, habits, and manners of the peoples of the Alpes-Maritimes region as intimately tied to its climate, no different from the region's other "natural" products: "If we have seen that plants and animals carry the imprint of climate, then man – child of the earth as the others – cannot deny this maternal influence."[13] This is echoed by Charles Lenthéric in the epigraph, from his popular 1878 book, Greece and the Orient in Provence:

The life of man is, in effect, intimately tied to the nature of the environment in which he lives; his manners, his customs, his migrations, his industry, the most minute conditions of his existence depend directly on the physical make-up of the surface on which he is active.[14]

Fig. 1, Anonymous, “A Sack of Flour and its Bearers—San Remo,” c. 1901. Photograph. In E. Staley, “The Burden-Bearers of the Riviera,” Sandow’s Magazine of Physical Culture 6 (January-June 1901), 28. © The British Library.

Fig. 2, Anonymous, “Aloes near San Remo—a natural affinity of the strong-limbed Burden-Bearers,” c. 1901. Photograph. In E. Staley, “The Burden-Bearers of the Riviera,” Sandow’s Magazine of Physical Culture 6 (January-June 1901), 28. © The British Library.

This concept of humans "carrying the imprint of climate" implied that local populations were physical manifestations of that environment—products grown from its soil and raised in its climate. As such, they served as signs of the salubrity of that climate, and medical geographers looked to their appearance and health for indications of the site's suitability to treat certain illnesses.[15] As late as 1901 these perceptions were still current; E. Staley, for example, in a popular physical culture magazine, visually compared the working women of the coast to its characteristic "strong-limbed" aloes (figs. 1, 2). Both human and plant are perceived as topographic products nurtured by the same climate, even the same soil, their appendages comparable in structure and form. Staley found their back-breaking labor noble and admirable, rallying his readers to emulate their strength and stamina. The visual comparison may appear to us surprising, even ridiculous, but the notion that the temperament and even physiology of certain ethnic groups were strongly tied to their particular environments is neither new nor extinct in the popular imagination. In his 1847 tourist handbook of France, John Murray described the temperament of southern locals as fundamentally driven by the Mediterranean sunlight: "The character of the people appears influenced by the fiery sun, and soil which looks as though it never cooled. Their fervid temperament knows no control or moderation."[16] Even today such views remain firmly intact, that southern peoples are characteristically passionate, temperamental, and brash. That Staley made the connection between southern bodies and southern climate literal by means of a physical comparison was, by the fin-de-siècle, a matter of common sense.

Significantly, if climate were responsible for the physical development of humans born and raised there, it could transform the external and internal structure of the visiting body, enabling physicians to utilize climate in a therapeutic context, that is, climatotherapy (cure by a "change of air"). Indeed, climate was perceived to be all the more powerful on marking or "imprinting" the invalid, since his or her body was in a delicate or weakened state through illness.[17] The invalid's body was understood as more receptive to and more quickly affected by the influence of a new climate than were healthy bodies. This was a fundamental principle underlying the widespread, international use of climatotherapy throughout the nineteenth century. The statements by Boudin, Foderé and Lenthéric are but a few exemplary cases of medical geographers and physicians interested in the effects of climate on man, and they shared a common scientific view in which the invalid's experience of place was distinguished from that of the healthy, "normal" or ordinary tourist.[18] Alain Corbin has argued that the invalid was a particular and peculiar figure of the nineteenth century, one who learned to develop an acute awareness of physical elements and their effects on the body:

With one voice, physicians, poets, and philosophers all urged greater preoccupation with and attention to self. The figure of the invalid that emerges from this convergence reveals the intensity with which coenaesthetic preoccupations were to obsess the leisured class in the nineteenth century. At the seaside holiday, even more than in the humidity of the spas, detailed behavioural patterns were codified as part of the quest for well-being. Invalids learn to savour the pleasant sensations provided by the smooth functioning of their bodies: good circulation, refreshing sleep, and renewed appetite.[19]

Corbin's use of the word, coenaesthetic (the general awareness of one's own body), is a useful way of conceptualizing how sensations were experienced as part of a therapeutic program. Climatotherapy was a medicalized and deeply naturalized way of perceiving place, and a plethora of tourist and medical literature exists from c. 1850–1920 about the Côte d'Azur as an appropriate site for it.[20] Physicians advised the chronically ill, like arthritics, to visit the region every winter, if not longer.[21] Chronic illnesses such as arthritis thus required continuing maintenance. As Corbin has made clear, the curative program or regime was well-structured, organizing and ordering not only the patient's therapeutic practices but his or her very lifestyle. In this context, Henri-Edmond Cross emerges as a particularly relevant case of a chronic invalid and active artist living on the Côte d'Azur when such perceptions of the imprinting, transformative powers of the region had become embedded within the popular imagination.

Cross: Artist-Arthritic
Cross is a fascinating example of an artist-invalid painting and therapeutically utilizing the Côte d'Azur, and has a unique position with which to approach attitudes to a region perceived simultaneously as beautiful and curative.[22] His chronic arthritis, which affected his joints and his vision,[23] has been constructed by his biographers, his friends, and even himself as a catalyst to his image-making: from the early 1880s when Cross spent his winters in Monaco and was first struck by the light of the coast, as manifest in his Jardin à Monaco (1884, Musée de la Chartreuse, Douai); to 1891 when he simultaneously moved permanently to the coast for his health and took up a neo-impressionist style (first in the Portrait de Mme H. F., 1891, Musée d'Orsay, Paris); to the early 1900s when his constant struggles and frustrations of living with painful inflammations affected his ability to paint; and finally to his untimely and painful death, due to cancer, in 1910.[24] Of pain, Isabelle Compin, the authority on Cross, wrote in 1964:

The acute suffering in his joints and his eye troubles, which he endured with courage, were all the more difficult for him as they rendered work impossible and such forced inaction was demoralizing. In this way, the torments of the body added to those of the mind. But when his health again improved, then, with the resources of his aiding will-power, he used this time of respite to its maximum and, as if to compensate for the painful, overwhelming periods, let blossom his vitality, long constrained. Moreover, he lived these moments of peace with an eagerness and an increased fervour because he knew them threatened and sensed their brevity.[25]

This would be echoed over forty years later, by art historian Claire Maignon in 2006:

His paintings of the final years overtly celebrate the captivating body of woman as nymph, in symbiosis with nature, blending into the cork woods. The lemon tints become sharper, the orange tints incandescent. The poetic exaggeration of the harmony of colors may well have been an escape for the painter from the gnawing pain which for decades had prevented him from working in peace. Now very frail, he therefore eagerly seized the rare moments of respite to give free rein to his coloristic verve.[26]

Note the lionizing rhetoric apparent in both passages, with the emphasis on physical pain and the courage to suffer it. Compin and Maignon have chosen to set up Cross's art as something done in spite of his arthritis, namely the physical restrictions it imposed on his lifestyle, or because of it, as an act of consolation and escape. No doubt their opinions were influenced by primary sources, namely the memories left by the artist's closest friends and his own letters. His friend and fellow artist, Lucie Cousturier (1876–1925), for example, described Cross's arthritis as a disability with which he constantly battled.[27] Cross himself made clear in letters to his circle how much his condition was ever-present in his daily existence. In a letter of circa 1906, he wrote to Maria van Rysselberghe, the writer and wife of Théo van Rysselberghe, that he had no memory of ever feeling fully recovered from illness.[28] Cross positioned himself as a chronic arthritic, perpetually unhealthy, and suffering from a degenerative condition. Not surprisingly, the issue of health dominates his correspondence, which has become the foundation of his biography.

My interest in the relationship between Cross's art and arthritis does not follow the lead of other art historians. Is it excessive to place such emphasis on a few inflamed joints? I believe, in fact, that not enough stress has been laid upon Cross's degenerative condition as a significant element of his artistic practice, and I do not mean in this sympathetic, sentimental, and even piteous vein. A chronic physical condition onset during his youth,[29] Cross's arthritis necessitated a permanent move south to the Côte d'Azur, various therapies (including electrotherapy, climatotherapy, medication, and massage)[30] and therefore ongoing self-regimentation and treatment. All of these were informed choices made by Cross which had significant impact on his life and career, as significant as the aesthetic choices he made as a methodical neo-impressionist painter. In his working method we find traces of the artist-invalid experiencing heightened sensations and receptivity to nature, and particularly so in relation to the late work.

Fig. 3, Henri-Edmond Cross, Nymphes, 1906. Oil on canvas. Private Collection.

Fig. 4, Henri-Edmond Cross, Le Bois, 1906–07. Oil on canvas. Musée de l’Annonciade, Saint-Tropez.

The Late Work (1906–1910) and the Liberation of Facture
In early 1906, Cross took on a new project, hiring models to pose nude en plein air in the wooded brush near his house in Saint-Clair.[31] Studies like Étude pour Nymphes: Femme au chapeau, nu en plein air (c. 1906, Private Collection) became preparatory works for the finished painting, Nymphes (1906; fig. 3). Situated in dense foliage at the edge of the Mediterranean Sea, three female nudes are depicted as though either emerging as natural entities from the landscape or melting into it. Treating both figures and landscape with the same larger, squared touches typical of his later work, Cross abandoned the distinct contouring so apparent in L'Air du soir (c. 1893, Musée d'Orsay) and La Plage ombragée (1902, Private Collection), where the figures are clearly delineated from their environs. In Nymphes, the seated figure to the right is treated with inconsistent contouring, with virtually nothing to discriminate her reclining thigh from the forest floor. Accented with vertical, multi-colored touches of paint, thigh and ground appear sutured together. Equally, her right arm simply melts away with the cessation of fleshy pink tones. To the left, the standing nude curves her right arm, her hand resting on a branch. Green touches of paint, used to create shadow, overwhelm her arm and spread over to her collarbone. Lighter units of green contour the curvature of her breasts as well as the spine of her neighbor. Later that year in the autumn, he again employed a model to pose among cork oaks, trees particular to southwest Europe and northwest Africa, resulting in finished paintings like Le Bois (1906–1907; fig. 4). In this work, the nudes similarly appear to disintegrate into their southern surroundings, the lower limbs of the two standing nudes and the reclining nude simply cut off and blended into foliage. Like the myth of the Greek goddess Daphne, whose father transformed her into a laurel tree to escape the amorous advances of Apollo, Cross's late nudes appear as though in the process of being totally absorbed into the landscape, but through color and tesserae-like brushwork, a mosaic of color and light without contours. The dominant pinks and greens of both Nymphes and Le Bois indicate, too, that the works still adhere to the neo-impressionist principle of color complementaries. Despite Cross's use of relatively large, square markings, he has also continued to use a divisionist application of separate, individual touches of paint in the works. Whether the latter still allows for "optical mixing" for the viewer, as advocated by Ogden Rood and others, is questionable; their uniform size and squared shape resist that effect, and yet overall the paintings still shimmer and vibrate with light.

Exemplary of Cross's late work, Nymphes and Le Bois are perceived by art historians as expressing freedom of touch and freedom of imagination, liberated from the anguish of his physical reality. For example, his style has been explained by Isabelle Compin as changing subtly over the years, from his first works of the early 1890s, towards increasing freedom and imagination by the end of his life. In particular, she devotes discussion to two aspects of Cross's stylistic changes over the years: the liberation or enlargement of his touches of paint, namely the dots; and the liberation of color, especially with regard to his representation of sunlight. By 1906, his "late" period, Cross's subject matter would also change, now including mythological scenes, which Compin describes as the liberation of his imagination.[32]

Fig. 5, Henri-Edmond Cross, La Plage de Baigne-Cul, 1891–1892. Oil on canvas. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.

In the early 1890s, when Cross first took up the neo-impressionist technique, he strictly adhered to employing small, round dots of relatively equal size and regular spacing. The Plage de Baigne-Cul of 1891-1892 (fig. 5) is a good example of Cross's early neo-impressionist execution. The dots are delicately, methodically, and evenly applied all over the surface of the canvas. But not only is the facture indicative of his early style, its color is characteristic of Cross's initial attempts to capture the sunlight of the region. Compin noted, "The tints Cross arranged in this way are pure but soft, because they are strongly blended by white. It is because, at that time, Cross tried to express true luminosity by blanching [décoloration], having noticed that deep light absorbs colors."[33] No doubt Compin was aware of the analysis by the artist and critic, Maurice Denis (1870–1943), who frequently wrote about Cross and noted this early tendency to blanch or whiten (décolor) the entire canvas in an attempt by Cross to "represent" rather than "reproduce" true sunlight (a reference, of course, to Denis's hero, Paul Cézanne).[34] In La Plage de Baigne-Cul, white dominates the canvas, more than half of the surface, including the depiction of sand as well as of water, especially along the shoreline. The effect is almost blinding.

Compin stated that, by 1895, Cross's interests began to change towards a new, more personal aesthetic research: "Fortified by the severe discipline of the neo-impressionist style, Cross searched from now on to surpass it. With it, as with the literal representation of nature, he would begin to take more liberties and that is how, from 1895 until 1903, his evolution towards a more personal art was made."[35] It is at this point that Cross abandons décoloration and instead represents the region's luminosity through intensified color harmonies. Compin views the change as fundamental to Cross's personal development. The execution of the dot changes as well, and although he continues to employ separate units of paint, they increase in size and allow for "an execution both freer and more rapid."[36] By the early 1900s, those touches of paint take on a square, mosaic-like effect.

Cross's work of 1906–10 is characterized by imaginative subject-matter revolving around female and, to a lesser extent, male nudes in the guise of nymphs and fauns set within the Côte d'Azur landscape, of which Nymphes is exemplary. The works have signaled to Compin a "will to give free expression to his personal fantasy."[37] Indeed, this must also be an iteration of Denis's initial comments; in 1910 Denis wrote that, in his late work, Cross "composed, and his liberated imagination called forth nymphs, fauns and dryads to fill the sculptural forms of Elysian landscapes."[38]

Situated next to the photographs featured in Staley's contemporaneous article (figs. 1, 2), Cross's late works, Nymphes and Le Bois (figs. 3, 4), make the integration of body and landscape literal on their painted surfaces. The union of figure and landscape in the late works is asserted over and over again in Cross's historiography. In the 1905 preface to Cross's first solo exhibition, the Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren (1855–1916) described recent work by Cross in which the forms of the figures melt into their surroundings, "where the human being, with her human flesh, seems to exist only as a plant full of fruits."[39] In 1964, this would be echoed by Compin, about paintings in which "the figures integrate into the landscape as vegetal and human forms, founded on the same arabesque lines, participating equally in the general rhythm."[40] And in 1998, François Baligand would write that "The…characters, under intense lighting, integrate with the landscape and participate in this communion with a generous and sensual nature."[41]

Such perceptions of Cross's increasingly liberated touch during his two decades on the Côte d'Azur remain firmly in place among art historians today.[42] This emphasis on "liberation," occurring repeatedly in the vocabulary, has therefore dominated both the primary and secondary sources, becoming a staple in his historiography. This narrative has implied that, despite two decades of unwavering interest in the coast's landscape and its intense sunlight, Cross progressively loosened or opened up a rigid, neo-impressionist facture towards increasing freedom, while also freeing his imagination to depict a world between fantasy and reality. But why should this be so? Why describe the stylistic changes throughout this oeuvre as a continuous trajectory towards increasing "freedom," a breaking away from the supposedly oppressive neo-impressionist theories of Seurat? To see these artistic developments as inevitable or natural, that the mature artist's style "naturally" becomes more experimental, looser, and freer, simply conforms to normative narrative strategies of art-historical literature.[43] More pertinent is to question what underlying assumptions have driven and continue to drive this narrative. I believe the narrative is, firstly, rooted in a widespread, long-standing belief established by medical geographers in the imprinting character of southern climates and, secondly, driven by Cross's personal experiences as a chronic arthritic on the Côte d'Azur.

From North to South
Raphaël Dupouy noted that of all the descriptions of Cross by his circle, "the most often is the term 'douceur' [softness, gentleness, delicacy] – the 'doux' Cross – that recurs in the words of his friends, worried about his health."[44] This conception of Cross's intertwined physical state (weak and delicate) and psychological persona (sweet and gentle) remains firmly in place. In 1998, Baligand juxtaposed the strong, "ardent" body of Signac with the weak, "timid" body of Cross: "While the passionate, ardent and eloquent young Signac divided his life between Saint-Tropez and Paris, Cross, of a timid and reserved nature, weakened by a chronic illness, left the south of France only for short stays in Paris on the occasion of the Salons."[45] What significance has Cross's persona as doux had on past and present perceptions of his biography and his neo-impressionist artistic production?

If we accept that a biography is a selective staging of a life, or the narration of progressive milestones, accomplishments, trials and tribulations, then it becomes less an approach to analyzing visual or literary representations than a representation in itself. It is a compilation or assemblage by various contributors of facts, opinions, assumptions, exaggerations, mistakes, and even falsities. One's life and one's biography are therefore two quite different things. I accept that Cross's "true" life is not recoverable. His biography, on the other hand, is a vital source of information that exemplifies deeply-embedded perceptions of the Côte d'Azur as a landscape of mental and physical stimulation, of total bodily liberation for the artist and the invalid.

Cross's biography is inundated with ideas about the climate of the Côte d'Azur initiating a transformation of his health and thoughts. Cross's biographers have repeatedly emphasized his northern French origins, as a man of Douai whose passion for art and true self could not find release until he descended south. Maurice Denis articulated this about Cross as early as 1910:

He was a man of the North who, under a cool appearance, hid with a kind of modesty an ardent heart. He was born in the fog of Flanders, in Douai, where he began to paint; he studied in the cave of Bonvin and grew tired quickly there of... sombre painting; then he settled on the coast of Provence, and it was there that he died between the blue sea and blossoming gardens. All his artistic life took place between this departure from the dark and this arrival to the sun.[46]

Such views of southern climates, particularly those bordering the Mediterranean Sea, as "liberating" occur frequently in contemporaneous literature by writers who were also invalids, though they are part of a much longer tradition of travellers' encounters with the "South."[47] In his early novels as well as in his autobiography, the writer André Gide (1869–1951), a friend of the neo-impressionists,[48] evoked invalid experiences of the Mediterranean that exemplify a widespread perception of the transformative, "imprinting" power of southern climates. In 1895 he began writing Les Nourritures terrestres, which was published in 1897 following his two-year stay convalescing from pulmonary tuberculosis in Biskra, Algeria. Gide and his biographers would describe his recovery as a rebirth akin to a miracle.[49] We find parallels to his own experiences in this pantheistic tale and in the quasi-autobiographical novel of 1902, L'Immoraliste. That novel also takes place in Algeria as well as on the Italian Riviera, in the towns of Sorrento and Ravello. Gide described the descent south in that novel with his protagonist, Michel's voice, writing, "That descent into Italy gave me all the dizzy sensations of a fall.... I felt I was leaving abstraction for life, and though it was winter, I imagined perfumes in every breath…on the threshold of this land of tolerance and promise, all my appetites broke out with sudden vehemence."[50] The transition from northern countries towards the southern coastlines of the French and Italian Rivieras was also expressed in many tourist handbooks as a profound physical and mental experience.[51] The Mediterranean climate, with its drier air, warmer temperature, exotic vegetation, and most especially its light, served as a marker of entry into a new land. Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94) was even more explicit, writing in an essay entitled, "Ordered South," of 1874:

Moreover, there is still before the invalid the shock of wonder and delight with which he will learn that he has passed the indefinable line that separates South from North. And this is an uncertain moment; for sometimes the consciousness is forced upon him early, on the occasion of some slight association, a colour, a flower, or a scent; and sometimes not until, one fine morning, he wakes up with the southern sunshine peeping through the persiennes, and the southern patois confusedly audible below the windows.[52]

Like Gide, Stevenson was tubercular, and spent the winter of 1873-1874 in Menton. For these writers, the journey south was marked by new sights, feelings, smells of exotic flora, a "softer" air, and increasing luminosity. As invalids, such experiences were felt and perceived to be particularly acute. An invalid diary from the 1860s, written by an anonymous young, tubercular woman sent to Cannes by her physician, posited the healing powers of climate on her ill body as a revitalizing, penetrating, and regenerative transformation. She wrote to her friend, in a poetic entry of December 7, 1864:

Reassure yourself. Perhaps I will not die....Oh! no, it must not be possible to die here, under this exhilarating sun. Life, which overflows with this rich and luxuriant nature, is infectious, and through all the pores it penetrates into you. This air which one breathes, and in that one swims with delight, enters smoothly and softly into the chest; like a miraculous balsam, it tranquilizes the sharpest pains, and causes a delightful freshness to course through the veins.[53]

Similarly in his writings Gide asserted that illness rendered the body more porous to sensations. In Les Nourritures terrestres, Gide's protagonist stated, for instance, that,

At Rome…I went to walk in the gardens every day. I was ill and incapable of thinking; nature just sank into me; thanks to some nervous disorder, my body seemed at times to have no limits; it was prolonged outside myself—or sometimes became porous; I felt myself deliciously melting away, like sugar.[54]

And in another work, he depicted illness as initiating a major life change on his body while in Algeria:

I was lucky to be taken ill over there—very seriously ill, it's true—but my illness did not kill me—on the contrary—it only weakened me for a while, and had the distinct effect of giving me a taste for the rarity of life. It would seem that a weakened organism is more porous, more transparent, tenderer, more perfectly receptive to sensations. In spite of my illness, if not because of it, I was all receptivity and joy.[55]

These statements are crucial for understanding how the invalid was perceived to embody and therapeutically utilize the beneficial climate. In Gide's case, his increased "coenaesthetic preoccupations" (to use Corbin's term) were attributed solely to his illness, through which he perceived tuberculosis as enabling his heightened sensations of his environs. Such perceptions occur too, if only indirectly, in Cross's letters. In an undated letter to Maximilien Luce, Cross once remarked that his arrival at Saint-Clair had immediately influenced him with an overwhelming desire to paint, his own garden providing an absorbing and stimulating motif.[56]Le Jardin Rouge (c. 1906-1907, Private Collection), a composition closed off by a small, compacted space of encroaching foliage, suggests an intimacy of personal space. Simultaneously its seemingly unplanned smattering of units of paint exemplify Cross's aesthetic "liberation" towards a freer, more rapid execution. Denis described the painting's colors as evoking the feeling of summer heat and so intense they threaten to explode on canvas.[57] Cross's friend Verhaeren expressed deep admiration for his southern landscapes, paintings which he felt evoked an overt sensory awareness of the environment: "I love vehemently those of your canvases where the dense, squeezed, even cumbersome vegetation excites all our senses. Vision, smell, touch, taste are simultaneously courted; it reigns there as a pantheistic fire."[58]

Indeed the climate was so powerful in its capacity to alter the body that it could be dangerous. Tourists, and invalids especially, were warned not to indulge to excess under the stimulating influence of southern air.[59] Of weak or doux constitution, the invalid could be too receptive to such a powerful climate, necessitating active self-control.

Sensations, Impressions, Imprints
Letters written by Cross describe his immediate environs with a profound sense of intimacy: "I stroll deliberately and deliciously. I walk often, stopping before my old friends, the pine trees, the rocks, etc. They are numerous and all so rich in serenity as they encroach upon the path!"[60] And in a private notebook while on the Côte d'Azur, he wrote, "The thing that I want to represent…is myself. These trees, these mountains, this sea, it is myself."[61] Cross's own belief in his intimate connection, even integration, with his immediate natural surroundings goes beyond the recognition that his invalid body had successfully completed the process of acclimation to the environment. His words suggest that his visual translation of that environment, namely his landscape paintings, were a kind of self-portrait. In the 1905 preface to Cross's solo exhibition, Verhaeren explained that, following a trip to Italy in 1903, Cross's art had progressed towards aesthetic synthesis and imaginative fantasy, supplementing the direct study and glorification of nature with the glorification of his "inner vision."[62] For Cross, this vision or "personal conception of things"[63] was an active transformative process requiring the artist to submit to one's sensations of nature, yet exercise will-power in order to control them upon visual expression: "What does nature offer us? Disorder, chance, and gaps…. It is necessary to 'organize one's sensations'… for order and fullness…we transform, we transpose, we affirm."[64] Cross described his methodical working process as one of organizing sensations received through a direct study of his immediate environment, a process of transformation, transposition, and affirmation. In doing so, the transformative act involved submitting himself to nature, taking it in, synthesizing its effects, and translating them onto the canvas. He would also describe this process as a game of warring submissions and will-power.[65]

In an undated letter to Cousturier, Cross stated, "I persist to believe that this region is the most beautiful in the world; I have new and exquisite sensations in my garden or when traipsing along the path."[66] Continually receptive to experiencing new sensations, Cross's intimate relationship to that space was fundamental to his approach to painting. If we differentiate his working methods from those of Signac, for example, that intimacy becomes all the more evident. Signac explained his own approach to landscape painting, describing his Le Pin Parasol, "Aux Canoubiers" (1898, Musée de l'Annonciade, Saint-Tropez) in a journal entry of August 9, 1897:

For this landscape I act as I would for a large studio painting, fixing in advance my subject and my composition, and then going out to find in nature the necessary information. I am very happy with this method, and I will no longer use any other. In working here [Saint-Tropez, in his studio] I see what little importance and what little use that working directly after nature has.... I am sure that the man who is really strong can make everything come entirely out of his head.[67]

Cross's territorial intimacy reveals that his very approach to painting operated differently from Signac's, and was premised on an open receptivity to natural sensations. The last sentence of Signac's entry shows he felt that the direct study of nature was a "weak" approach, that the truly "strong," masculine artist had the will-power to resist submission to nature and rely on an active imagination. The so-called doux Cross, on the other hand, saw submission to his received impressions of nature as an important stage in the artistic process. But this was no easy feat for Cross; just like his health, it posed ongoing challenges and required patient study and care. In other words, Cross did not advocate a total submission to nature, "melting" into it as Gide had described and relished during his acute illness; Cross was chronically ill, and this required will-power.

Cross wrote privately of the ongoing difficulty to master self-control in order to concentrate on his work and overcome his physical suffering: "To speak of my works allays my illness. Thought must dominate the body's sufferings. This poor ill and broken body. Conserve a lucid mind to keep self-control."[68] An admirer of the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Cross's active struggle to overcome suffering and frustration complicates the doux figure depicted by his friends and biographers. For Nietzsche, the pain resulting from invalidism made one more perceptive, liberated in spirit, deepened as a human being, and with greater will-power.[69] In his letters to friends, Cross's working process en plein air reveals the challenges of its aesthetic translation, particularly during 1906 in the studies preparing for paintings such as Le Bois:

During the month of September, I sent for a female model. In a small wood of cork oaks close to home, whether in the sun or in the shadow this nude, in such decor, displayed in front of my eyes harmony of forms and tints entirely original for me. Some poor studies resulted from it. And now that the object is no longer there, I better sense my lack of boldness, my regrettable wisdom and I dream about my sensations which were full of enthusiasm and healthy folly. One shouldn't attempt now to rediscover some spark and reject with all one's might the far too abundant and tyrannical material![70]

These letters and written entries suggest continuous struggle to maintain self-control, balance, and order. Nature here is described as overwhelming, disordered, and tyrannical, his "healthy" sensations of it requiring studious internalization.[71] Yet what Cross meant by "sensations" is difficult to know for certain. In his 1984 book, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism, Richard Shiff noted that the word appears frequently in the letters exchanged between Cézanne, Denis, and Emile Bernard during 1895–1906. Of the word, Shiff explained that,

It is a difficult term in both French and English. "Sensation" has a double meaning since it refers to the perception of something external as well as to internal emotion – seeing and feeling. Considered with regard to its dual reference, the artist's "sensation" becomes analogous to his 'impression'; both experiences (sensation and impression) are simultaneously subjective and objective, interactions that imply the presence of both self and nature.[72]

I argue that the sensation or impression of his environment was perceived by Cross, and has become unconsciously perpetuated by art historians, as particularly acute, not only as an artist but also as an invalid.[73] Artistically, Cross's sensations were the received heightened impressions that marked his intimate experience and knowledge of the Maures environment. Cross's sensations have not been totally subsumed by the process of transposition into the medium of paint and, as Verhaeren and Denis noted, remain as potent visual traces on the canvas. Medically, the invalid's body was conceptualized by geographers and physicians as more delicate and receptive to the environment. The invalids Gide and Stevenson expressed their sensations upon arrival in the South as especially heightened; for Gide, it was "dizzying," and for Stevenson, a "shock of wonder and delight." Like these invalid writers, the sensory overload and pain resulting from chronic arthritis made Cross an artist especially sensitive to the Côte d'Azur and a true aesthete, to himself and to his contemporaries.

Like the standing nude in Nymphes, whose body, covered in green touches of paint, bears the mark of the landscape, so too was Cross's working process stamped by the direct study of and willing submission to nature. In other words, the nudes' integration into the landscape in Cross's Nymphes is a fitting visual metaphor for how the invalid was perceived to take on, receive, or embody the healing properties of southern climates.

Conclusions
Revisiting the narrative of Cross's oeuvre as laid out by Compin in 1964, itself a reiteration of views established first by Denis and Verhaeren, the artist's increasing stylistic and imaginative liberation rehearses an already well-established belief that the invalid's body underwent change due to the imprinting nature of the southern climate. This ongoing narrative of liberation corresponds to the perception that, as an invalid, Cross's body was understood, by himself and his friends, as perpetually doux. That choice of word is significant, for it implies softness, weakness, and delicacy of form and feeling. And as medical geographers and physicians were to assert, the invalid's body was more receptive, open, sensitive, and porous to climate and generally to place. Cross's progressive liberation of style, of color, and of subject matter was, in this context, the inevitable result of his delicate body's open receptiveness to the environment's natural properties. As late as 1998, Baligand described Cross's ultimate artistic development, culminating in the late period, as occurring concurrently with (or even being initiated by) his ultimate bodily suffering:

From 1903, Cross, cruelly afflicted by violent crises of rheumatisms, knew at the same time his most fecund period. After the uncertainties of the previous years, he pushed his researches to the extreme and, abandoning the constraints that he imposed on himself, let his art blossom following his imagination.[74]

Compelling and poignant, Baligand's statement, consciously or not, also positions Cross's disability as a vehicle for artistic escapism, the physical pain a catalyst to imaginative introspection: the more Cross suffers, the more his art benefits. While this perception fuelled Denis's, Verhaeren's, and Cousturier's analyses of Cross's art, and therefore existed within a historically (and, as I have argued, medico-geographically) specific context, today it necessitates recognition as an historical perception. Are there not other, more critical ways of analyzing the relationship between Cross's art and his ill-health?

In one rare instance, a short biography in Philippe Lanthony's Art and Ophthalmology: the Impact of Eye Diseases on Painters (2009), Cross is given a retrospective medical diagnosis to account for the style of his late work. Lanthony declares that Cross's eye troubles, which began in 1901 and culminated in a particularly acute attack lasting for three months in 1905, were due to anterior uveitis (or iritis, an inflammation of the uvea, the middle layer of the eye which includes the iris). Lanthony's sources are Compin, Baligand, and Cousturier, and despite his medical training and focus, he concludes that,

Once the attack of anterior uveitis had resolved, Cross went back to his
painting with a determination that much greater because he sensed
how vulnerable he was. This is proved by the abundance of his production of pictures during this era. The painstaking procedure of Seurat was not at all suitable for an artist who was terrified of going blind and was aware of the urgency of completing his Art work. This was undoubtedly one reason for the development of his style towards a much more open type of painting compared with that of the initiator of Pointillism.[75]

Fig. 6, Maximilien Luce, Portrait of Henri-Edmond Cross, 1898. Oil on canvas. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

For Lanthony, Cross's liberated facture by 1906 was a simple matter of practicality: quicker, less demanding, and less rigorous than the methodical application of Seurat. The ophthalmologist inserts Luce's portrait of Cross (Portrait of Henri-Edmond Cross, 1898; fig. 6), a work predating his first ocular attack by three years. Lanthony makes no reference to it, leaving his reader to speculate as to its purpose. Are we meant to perform our own retrospective diagnosis from the painting itself? If so, we are sorely frustrated by the fact that Cross displays no obvious symptoms of his disease. He stares at the viewer, clear and steadfast, surrounded by his canvases but not in the physical act of painting, resembling Nicolas Poussin's Self-Portrait of 1650 (Louvre, Paris). It is not an obvious visual declaration of Cross's status as "ill" or as a chronic sufferer. Lanthony's two-page "analysis" of Cross's medical biography is not, to my mind, a productive or critical approach of fusing art and medical histories. To the question, was Cross's art done in spite of or because of his arthritis? I respond, why must it be one or the other? Why the need to attribute stylistic changes in the art to direct physical causes—to the chronic illness itself? If the relationship between them is so direct, so overt, I could equally question the effect Cross's art had on his arthritis, of his aesthetic sensitivity on his physical condition. My point is that their intersection was far more complex, indirect and contentious, and that this one article can only begin to tease this out.

As a starting point, I suggest we, as scholars, position ourselves as empathic towards the artist's self-identification as an invalid and the life choices made because of the daily experiences of chronic illness, and not unique to the case of Cross. I am fully aware that Cross felt quite sincerely that he was a true artist and a suffering invalid, aesthetically and physically receptive to his surroundings, and so did his circle and biographers. I do not wish to suggest this was some deceptive strategy of victimization, on his part or others'. His letters make clear the reality of his chronic pain and his commitment to his career as a modern artist. However, the ongoing frustrations he recorded complicate an easy reading of Cross as a passive invalid and aesthetically "liberated" artist. Rather, the subject that emerges from primary images and texts was a man actively engaged with his art and his health, making informed aesthetic and therapeutic choices throughout his life (i.e., not only during the last five years). This position of strategic empathy has allowed me to engage critically with the literature that has produced a narrative of Cross as the suffering hero who achieves ultimate liberation or freedom, both physical and mental. So too has it allowed me to contextualize this narrative within larger social and medico-geographical beliefs.

When Cross went vers la lumière (towards the light), to the Maures region of the Côte d'Azur, he went there to study its sunlight, take the cure, immerse himself in his environs, and translate his sensations into visual products. In this article I have positioned Cross as an artist-invalid at the center of a network of physicians, tourists, invalids, writers, and artists. Through visual and literary representations and assertions, this intricate network of individuals constructed a shared perception of the Côte d'Azur as aesthetically and therapeutically transformative, and this perception is articulated and conceptualized in Cross's late work like Nymphes and Le Bois (figs. 3, 4). Depicting a literal and metaphorical merging of body and landscape, the paintings are more than merely diagnostic evidence of stylistic liberation, of exemplary late pieces that testify to heightened color and "freer" brushwork; they participate in the very production of that narrative.