Works by Paul Signac

Paul Signac, a keen sailor, painted seascapes, harbours and rivers in small separate touches of unmixed colour, a method he took up under Georges Seurat's influence after the two met in 1884.

Signac gave some canvases opus numbers. In Opus 217, his portrait of Félix Fénéon, from 1890, his friend and fellow anarchist stands in profile with top hat and cane, holding out a small white flower against spirals, stars and wavy bands. Saint-Tropez, the Port at Sunset, Opus 236, followed in 1892, the year he sailed to the Mediterranean and stayed in Saint-Tropez: its sails and water are built of blue, orange and yellow dots.

For a colour lithograph of 1889 he applied Charles Henry's chromatic circle, splitting the letters T and L into flat segments of colour above a roundel of dots. The Buoy, a six-colour lithograph of 1894, breaks the reflections of yellow houses into loose dabs around a red buoy. His essay From Eugène Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism, a history of colour and an account of the method, first appeared in instalments in 1898.

In Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde, Marseilles of 1905–1906 the touches are square dabs, far larger than the dots of the 1892 Port at Sunset, set like tiles over masts, water and the hill with its church. The 1906 watercolour of the calanque at Saint-Tropez is looser still: dark lines draw rocks and trees, colour sits in patches, and pencilled notes run down the bare left side. Harbours, rivers and the sea lead among the works below, then landscapes and town views; most are paintings, the rest prints and drawings, and the 1890s are best represented.

Sources: Wikipedia, Museum Barberini, National Gallery of Art, Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.