Henri-Edmond Cross (1856–1910) was born Henri-Edmond-Joseph Delacroix on 20 May 1856 in Douai, in northern France, to a French father and an English mother. To avoid confusion with the great Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix, he later took the name Cross. He studied art in Lille and then in Paris.
In 1884 he helped found the Salon des Indépendants, where he met Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. For years he painted in a naturalist manner, but from about 1891 he adopted the Neo-Impressionist technique of small, separate touches of colour. Suffering from rheumatism, he left Paris for the south and settled in Saint-Clair, near Le Lavandou in the Var, where Signac soon moved to nearby Saint-Tropez. His bright Mediterranean landscapes and bathers influenced Henri Matisse, who met him in 1904.
Cross had his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Druet in Paris in 1905, and in 1907 the critic Félix Fénéon organised a retrospective at Bernheim-Jeune. He died of cancer in Saint-Clair on 16 May 1910, and his works are in the Musée d’Orsay and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, among other museums.