Landscape with Stars
By Henri Edmond Cross, 1905
Thousands of tiny dabs cover this sky like scattered confetti, glowing blue, yellow, and soft white. Henri Edmond Cross painted "Landscape with Stars" around 1905 using pointillism, a method where small strokes of pure color sit next to each other without being mixed on the palette. Your eye does the blending instead, and from a few steps back the separate marks melt into shimmering patches of starlight. It is a clever trick, and Cross made it feel effortless.
Along the bottom, a row of dark trees and a quiet stretch of land settle the picture down and give the glittering sky something solid to rest against. Cross spent his later years in the south of France near the Mediterranean, where the warm light and open skies shaped much of his work. This scene carries that same mood, calm and a little dreamy, like the memory of a summer evening spent watching the stars come out.