Les Andelys, Port Morin

Paul Signac spent the summer of 1886 at Les Andelys, a small town on a bend of the Seine northwest of Paris, and came home with around ten canvases. This is one of that riverside group, looking across the water toward a stone bridge, a cluster of pale houses with red roofs, and trees doubled in the reflection below. The whole scene is built from separate touches of color laid side by side, so the river surface is not painted as one smooth sheet but as hundreds of small dabs of blue, green, mauve and cream that the eye mixes on its own.

The technique is Neo-Impressionism, sometimes called Pointillism or Divisionism, which Signac took up after meeting Georges Seurat in 1884. The idea came partly from color theory: pure pigments placed next to each other were meant to look brighter than the same colors mixed on a palette. Whether it really works is up for debate, but the sunlit bank in the foreground shows the ambition clearly, with peach and violet dots knocking against each other to suggest warm light falling on grass and dust. Signac was a keen sailor who owned a string of boats over his lifetime, and water shows up in his work again and again, from Normandy rivers to Mediterranean harbors. Here the far bank sits high in the picture, leaving that broad sloping foreground to do most of the talking.