Paul Signac at the Helm of the Olympia

The bearded sailor gripping the tiller is Paul Signac, one of the inventors of Pointillism and, by his own admission, a man happier on water than on land. He owned more than thirty boats over his lifetime and named several after paintings he admired, including this one, Olympia, after Manet. The portrait was made in 1896 by his close friend the Belgian painter Théo van Rysselberghe, who often gets left off the label. Signac had sailed the Olympia down to Saint-Tropez a few years earlier and helped turn that sleepy fishing port into an artists' haunt, so the boat has a small place in art history of its own.

The whole surface is built from separate dabs of color, the Neo-Impressionist method Signac himself championed: the sea is not painted blue but assembled from blue, green and violet touches that mix in your eye. Watch the wake curling away behind him, a churn of white and pale green flecks, and the varnished boom overhead where warm reds and oranges sit side by side to suggest polished wood in sunlight. Signac is not posing for us at all. He squints ahead at something out of frame, one hand steady on the tiller, entirely absorbed in the business of sailing.