Snow, Boulevard de Clichy, Paris

Curving tram tracks cut through the slush of a Paris boulevard, drawing the eye past a bundled man in a dark coat toward a row of bare plane trees and the hazy buildings beyond. Paul Signac painted this in 1886, when he was in his early twenties and living in Montmartre, just steps from the Boulevard de Clichy itself. The snow here is barely white at all. Get close and it breaks apart into flecks of pale blue, lilac, pink and yellow, laid down in short separate strokes so that your eye does the mixing. That technique was brand new at the time, worked out by Georges Seurat, whom Signac had met two years earlier and quickly adopted as a kindred spirit.

Signac was largely self-taught, having given up architecture after seeing a Monet exhibition, and this winter scene sits right at the hinge between Impressionism and the more systematic method that became known as Neo-Impressionism or Pointillism. He would spend most of his later career painting harbors and sailboats, so snow is an unusual subject for him. Another artist was working the same stretch of pavement around this time: Vincent van Gogh, who lived nearby with his brother Theo and became Signac's friend in 1887. The two of them went out to paint together along the Seine at Asnières, trading ideas about color that both would carry in very different directions.