Port-en-Bessin, the Beach

A stumpy stone tower perches on the cliff at the left, built in the seventeenth century to keep watch over the little Norman harbor of Port-en-Bessin. Paul Signac painted this view in the mid-1880s, when he was barely into his twenties and still working in a loose Impressionist manner, laying down thick, choppy strokes of green, mauve and ochre. The pebble beach in the foreground is really just hundreds of short dabs of cream, pink and grey paint, and the sea beyond is handled the same restless way. Notice the thin mast rising near the village houses: that is the semaphore station, used to signal ships coming in and out.

Signac had no formal training. He taught himself by copying the Impressionists after seeing a Monet show in Paris, and you can spot Monet's influence all over this canvas, from the broken brushwork to the heavy weather in the sky. Not long after, he met Georges Seurat and threw himself into pointillism, the dot-by-dot method he would champion for the rest of his life. Seurat, as it happens, came to this same harbor in 1888 and painted it in that stricter style. Comparing the two is a neat way to see how fast Signac's ideas changed. He was also a passionate sailor who owned a string of boats, which explains why so much of his work ended up looking out at the water.