Maximilien Luce
Neo-Impressionist of building sites and steelworks, and an anarchist who was jailed for it.
Maximilien Luce was born in Paris in 1858, trained as a wood engraver, and took up divisionism after meeting Seurat, Signac and Pissarro in the 1880s. What separates him from the rest of the Neo-Impressionists is the subject matter: labourers, foundries, pile-drivers, the steelworks of Charleroi and the building sites of Paris, painted with the same systematic dots used elsewhere for bathers and harbours. He was a committed anarchist, contributed to Le Pere Peinard and other papers, and was imprisoned at Mazas in 1894 during the trial of the thirty. He later loosened the technique considerably, and died in 1941.
The divisionist works of roughly 1887 to 1900 lead the market by a wide margin; the much larger later output in a freer Impressionist manner is a different and more modest field, and the two are frequently conflated. Luce was extremely prolific across sixty years and the supply of later work is substantial. The catalogue raisonne by Bouin-Luce and Bazetoux is the reference. He also produced lithographs and a large body of drawings and watercolours, including the anarchist illustrations.
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