Venice, Saint-Georges, Sunset

Venice's most photographed silhouette sits at the center of this canvas: San Giorgio Maggiore, Palladio's white church on its own small island, with its brick campanile rising above the water. Paul Signac painted it around 1908, following trips to the city where he filled sketchbooks with rapid watercolors on the spot and then built the oil paintings later in his studio. In the foreground, gondolas cluster around striped mooring poles, one gondolier standing at his oar, while the lagoon spreads out in flickering strokes of turquoise, mint and rose.

Signac was Seurat's closest ally in Neo-Impressionism, the movement that broke color into separate dabs so the eye would mix them instead of the brush. By this point in his career the tiny dots had grown into chunky little rectangles, laid side by side like the tesserae of a Byzantine mosaic, which feels right for a city full of them. Look at the sky and you will find no grey at all: the haze is built from pink, yellow, lilac and pale green sitting next to each other. Signac was also a devoted sailor who owned more than thirty boats over his lifetime, and his fondness for water shows in the way the lagoon takes up almost half the picture, restless and busy with color.