Les Andelys, les bains

A floating bathhouse sits moored on the Seine, its red-brown walls punctuated by two diamond-shaped windows and a small tricolor flag snapping from the mast. Ladders drop into the water, wooden pilings jut up, and the crossed railings suggest a place where villagers came to swim on hot afternoons. Paul Signac painted this in the summer of 1886 at Les Andelys, a town in Normandy where he produced about ten canvases in a single stay. He had just seen Georges Seurat's huge Sunday scene of La Grande Jatte at the last Impressionist exhibition that spring, and he threw himself into the new dot-by-dot method with real enthusiasm.

More than half the picture is water, and that is where the painting earns its keep. Signac built the river out of thousands of small marks in gold, mauve, green and blue, so the reflections of the far bank shimmer rather than mirror. The technique, called Divisionism or Neo-Impressionism, relies on your eye doing the blending from a few steps back. Signac was a passionate sailor who owned dozens of boats over his lifetime and spent decades painting harbors and rivers, so a humble river bathing station suited him perfectly. His signature sits in the lower left in the same pointillist dots as everything else, painted in red against the blue water.