Now avaiable for purchase through Sotheby's, London
 
"Notre Dame de Paris"  by Maximilien Luce,  1899
oil painting on canvas panel 11 ⅜” x 14 ⅞” (29cm x 38cm).
Frame: 21”h x 24”w
Signed 'Luce  99’ lower left corner
(Subject to prior sale)
 
Provenance:
Private Collection; purchased 9/19/1966 from Galerie Rene Drouet, Paris (Original receipt available)
The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Denise Bazetoux.
 
Maximilien Luce was a French Neo-Impressionist artist, known for his paintings, illustrations, and engravings. As a painter, Luce was initially influenced by Impressionism, and was later inspired by the Divisionist style of Georges Seurat. He would go on to adopt a Pointillist approach to painting, as evidenced in his 1895 work On the Bank of the Seine at Poissy. 
 
In 1899 he started painted the Notre Dame series, which he was to work for several years.  He painted the insubstanial light of the early morning , or the guilded light of autumn, wherin the Cathedral appears both identical and different from one painting to another. This is one of the early paintings in this series from the same location, which include his most valued works.  Luce painted just over a dozen versions of the west façade of Notre-Dame de Paris. The Notre-Dame paintings are perhaps the most impressive works that Luce ever painted around a single motif. Albert Dubois-Pillet, a close friend and fellow Neo-Impressionist, invited Luce to use of his studio at 19, quai Saint-Michel, which gave him this excellent view on the cathedral looking east across the Seine to the front portals of Notre-Dame.
 
While he was best known for depicting landscapes, Luce also frequently took up political topics as his subject matter, identifying and empathizing with the proletariat. Born March 13, 1858 in Paris, France.  At the age of 14 he was an apprentice to the wood engraver Henri-Théophile Hildebrand. At the end of his life, Luce became less politically active and withdrew from anarchist activism, and his style returned to the Impressionistic mode in which he had first painted. He died February 7, 1941 in Paris.