The Bonaventure Pine

A single umbrella pine takes up almost the whole canvas, its dark canopy spreading sideways like a cloud that decided to settle on a hill. Paul Signac painted it near Saint-Tropez in 1893, and the tree was a real landmark, growing on the Bonaventure estate above the gulf. Behind it you can pick out the Maures hills in violet, a couple of sailboats, and water striped with pink and yellow. The whole thing is built from thousands of separate dabs of color, laid side by side so your eye does the blending. Green sits next to red, blue next to orange, and the mixing happens as you look.

Signac was the main champion of this technique, called Neo-Impressionism or pointillism, which he developed alongside his friend Georges Seurat. After Seurat died suddenly in 1891, Signac sailed south and stumbled on Saint-Tropez, then a small fishing village with no real road to it. He bought a house there and stayed for decades, and his enthusiasm brought other painters down, including Matisse, who arrived in 1904 and left with his own ideas about color. The pine itself is worth noticing for one odd thing: the trunk leans hard to the right, shaped by years of mistral wind, while the branches keep reaching left as if arguing with it.