When Paul Signac hung his large view of Le Port de Rotterdam at the Salon des Indépendants in the spring of 1907, he set in motion a small Neo-Impressionist pilgrimage. Among those who took note was his old friend Maximilien Luce, who travelled to the Netherlands later that year in the company of Kees van Dongen—the Rotterdam-born Fauve who had been urging the virtues of the Dutch light upon his French contemporaries for some time. Luce installed himself on the Nieuwe Maas, studied the old masters at the Rijksmuseum and the Mauritshuis, and filled a campaign of some weeks with oils of the harbour and its surroundings. The present work is one of the results.

The subject carried weight for Luce that it did not, quite, for Signac. By 1907 Rotterdam was the largest working harbour in Europe, its quays along the Maas moving the coal and ore of the Ruhr and the timber of the Baltic at a rhythm that no French port could match. For an artist whose lifelong sympathy lay with working people, the welders of Charleroi, the stevedores of Le Havre, the rolling-mill hands of the Sambre valley, the Dutch quayside offered a subject already familiar in principle but newly seen in scale. Where Signac’s Rotterdam views are, in the main, studio compositions worked up in Saint-Tropez from drawings and postcards made on the spot, Luce’s appear to have been taken from direct and sustained observation; and where Signac sought out the Maasbruggen, Luce, characteristically, turned his attention to the water and the shipping themselves.

The composition is governed by a deep, low horizon. Roughly two-thirds of the canvas is given to water, a green-blue expanse worked in the short, detached strokes that Luce had refined through twenty years of Divisionist practice and was now handling with a freer, broader touch. A narrow band of industry runs across the middle distance: on the left, the masts of moored sailing vessels, the lattice arms of dockside cranes, and the tall brick chimneys of a waterfront foundry, each fuming a violet-grey smoke that drifts upwards into a hazed atmosphere; on the right, a further shoreline recedes into mist, its shipping sketched in a few economical marks. The principal motif sits slightly left of centre: a dark-hulled steam barge, funnel raised amidships, her exhaust climbing in a column of mauve and leaden purple that binds foreground to sky. A small tug, or perhaps a tender, crosses the lower left.

Luce has laid the surface of the water with a prodigious vocabulary of short horizontal strokes, emerald, celadon, cerulean, rose, ochre, lilac, white, each one kept distinct, so that the optical mixture happens in the viewer’s eye rather than on the palette. The method is Seurat’s in principle; the execution is not. Where Seurat stippled with a fine and patient point, Luce draws the brush across the surface in short, flat marks, and the paintwork acquires the light it describes rather than the diagrammatic order of a theorem. This is Neo-Impressionism past its orthodox decade, kept disciplined but freed of its dogma.
The palette is tuned with considerable refinement. The dominant chord is cool, the green-blue of brackish river water under a grey-white northern sky, and Luce relieves it sparingly. The smoke of the central funnel carries the work’s most sustained passage of warm colour: a mauve-into-violet rising column, set against the paler atmospheric grey above. Against the greens, a handful of orange flecks on the foreground water and a rust-red on the hull of the tug operate as accent notes, not illustratively but tonally, in the manner of Signac’s own harbour studies of the period. Nothing is forced; the painting never raises its voice.

The catalogue raisonné of Luce’s oeuvre records a sustained series of port and riverside views of Rotterdam executed in 1907 and 1908, the fullest realisation of which in a public collection is La Meuse à Rotterdam, now held by Les Pêcheries, Musée de Fécamp. Others in the sequence include the nocturnal Le Port de Rotterdam, le soir of 1908, in which the same industrial silhouette is carried over into a variation of reds and violets against a darkened firmament. The present work belongs to the daylight group and is among the more spatially ambitious of it: the high vantage, the deep recession across the water, and the great unbroken foreground of Divisionist paintwork demand more of the artist than the close-quarters quayside views do and reward him with a broader sense of place.

Rotterdam, Scène de Port records Luce at a point of considered maturity: no longer the disciple of Seurat and Signac, not yet the looser hand of his Rolleboise years, but an artist in full command of the means that suit his eye. The subject is Dutch; the handling is French; the sympathy is international. Few ports of call in his long career yielded a body of work as coherent or as quietly ambitious as the Rotterdam campaign of 1907, and the present picture stands among the best of them.