Biographies

Henri Edmond Cross (1856 – 1910)

He was the son of a French father and a British mother, and was born in Douai in 1856. He spent his childhood and youth in Lille. At the age of ten, he took drawing and painting lessons from E.A. Carolus-Duran and then studied briefly under Colas at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. His real surname was Delacroix which he anglicized in 1881 to escape from the inevitable comparisons to the great romantic painter of that name. He learned to draw in Lille, near his birth town of Douai and he continued his studies in Paris. In 1884 he co-founded the Society of independent artists. At this time, his work still paid tribute to the style of Edouard Manet and the impressionists. In 1891 he adopted, under the influence of his colleagues and Seurat Signac, the divisionist technique. He helped lead the way toward Fauvism.