Paul Signac was a Parisian painter who, together with Georges Seurat developed pointillism, the movement linked to breaking down colours into tiny dots. He discovered his “calling” as a painter early in the 1880s, and things were facilitated by the fact that he frequented the artistic milieus of Montmartre, the district where he lived with his family. After his father died he moved to Asnières-sur-Seine, on the northwest outskirts of Paris – the place that inspired his early landscapes. In 1884, he showed his paintings at the Salon des Artistes Indépendants along with around four hundred artists who had been rejected by the Salon officiel because the jury considered them too innovative. At that exhibition he met Georges Seurat and they began the technical experiments that led to pointillism: a new painting technique inspired by the work of French Michele Eugène Chevreul who studied the perception of colours that leaves the tasks of mixing dots of pure colour applied to the support to the viewer’s eye. On 30 June 1883, together with Odilon Redon and Seurat, Signac founded the Societé des Artistes Indépendants and also worked with Camille Pissarro, a convert to Divisionism, affiliated with the group of the so-called “scientific Impressionists”. Seurat’s untimely death in 1891 – he was only thirty – prompted Signac to leave Paris for the sea in the north and south of France. His relationship with the sea went well beyond inspiration for his paintings, and before he became a skilled sailor on the high seas he had sailed the Seine. It was the painter Gustave Caillebotte who made him fall in love with the water by taking him sailing on the Seine as early as 1885. The river, with its bends, calm water and transparencies reflecting nature’s intense colours inspired many of Signac’s paintings, including fourteen, similarly-sized works on canvas board (actually,
the general catalogue only mentions thirteen), painted at the end of the 1890s at Samois, a township, or commune, on the banks of the Seine at the northeast edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau. The series is not dated, but we know when it was done from the letters Signac exchanged with the neoImpressionist painter Charles Angrand between 26 March and December 1899 concerning the purchase of Study n. 8 which, after several changes of ownership entered the collection of the Courboud Foundation in Cologne. Therefore, this study was not shown at the 18th exhibition of the Société des Artistes Indépendants, held at the Grande Serre de l’Alma in Paris during the spring of 1902 when Hugo von Tschudi, then director of the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, purchased the first four that were later gifted to the Staatsgemäldesammlungen, the state-owned museum in Munich where Hugo von Tschudi served as director of the Staatliche Antikensammlungen until his death in 1911. On 2 June 1902, after the conclusion of the exhibition at the Grande Serre, Signac opened a one-man show at the Galerie de l’Art nouveau owned by the art dealer Siegfried Samuel Bing, who was friendly with several Parisian artists including Toulouse Lautrec, Seurat, and Signac. At Bing’s gallery he showed the other eight studies of the series, including our picture that was number 11. The bright-coloured painting executed with a very thick pointillist technique depicts a bend in the river with the green, yellow and purple crowns of the trees reflected in pink water that reprises the colour of the sky. The painting returned to the artist’s studio at the conclusion of the show, and then reached the Italian market at some unknown date when it was acquired by the Galleria dell’Annunciata in Milan.
TESORI RITROVATI IMPRESSIONISTI E CAPOLAVORI MODERNI DA UNA RACCOLTA PRIVATA - 29 ottobre 2019
165