Maximilien Luce

Luce's career began in the 1880s when he trained as a wood engraver before taking painting classes and depicting his neighbors in the working-class neighborhood of Montrouge. By 1887, he joined the neo-impressionist circle around Seurat, establishing a close link with Signac, Pissarro, and Felix Féneon, all anarchists. His career unfolded over decades as he remained politically engaged, and his later works document the first world war. Throughout his oeuvre, Luce made studies of urban laborers, men and women at work and home, playing their trade or executing mundane routines often in interiors illuminated by the large windows typical of Paris.
This sheet and a second related study (2009.196) in the Morgan are from the start of his career and are loosely connected to the paintings "The Cobbler at the Window,"1883 (private collection; Bouin-Luce and Bazetoux 1986, no.31), and "The Cobblers: The Givort Brothers,"1884 (private collection; Bouin-Luce and Bazetoux 1986, no. 37). The cobbler in the 1883 canvas, Legaret is shown with his companion, Mère Magloire, seated in an attic working by the light of a small garret window, which is set on an angle in the roof. Legaret was a cousin of Luce's neighbor, a friend and cobbler Eugène Givort, who is shown seated alongside his standing brother next to a large window. While the two Morgan studies with their mustachioed sitter could depict Legaret, it seems more plausible that they are early studies for the Givort painting, focusing on the figure of the seated brother who also sports cropper hair and a mustache. Rejecting this frontal view of the single cobbler, Luce chose an angled view of the seated worker with his brother standing to the right. The strange, seemingly effaced outline on the present sheet might indicate the start of a standing figure.
Both paintings were likely exhibited in the important 1894 exhibition at the "Galerie des Néo-Impressionistes, Chez Moline,"alongside the watercolors of Paul Signac.