The Buoy (section)

Paul Signac painted this harbor the way he saw it best: from the water. He was a passionate sailor who owned a long string of boats over his lifetime, and in 1892 he sailed into Saint-Tropez, then a small fishing village, and liked it enough to buy a house on the hill above it. The buildings here are ordinary working houses with terracotta roofs, the boats are working boats, but the light does something odd to them. Look at the walls: they are not painted yellow so much as built from separate touches of yellow, orange, pink and green sitting side by side, letting your eye mix them at a distance.

That method has a name, Neo-Impressionism, and Signac developed it with his friend Georges Seurat in the 1880s. By the time of this picture he had loosened up, swapping Seurat's tiny pinpricks for chunkier square strokes that look almost like mosaic tiles. The water at the bottom is where the technique earns its keep, with round dabs of orange and rose floating on blue in a way that reads as reflection without ever quite copying it. Saint-Tropez became a magnet for younger painters partly because of Signac. Matisse spent the summer of 1904 there as his guest and went home with a head full of bright, broken color.