Les Andelys

In the summer of 1886 Signac, still in his early twenties, went to stay in Les Andelys, a small town on the Seine downstream from Paris, and spent three months painting the riverbank. He had just fallen in with Georges Seurat, who was breaking colour into separate dots that the eye is meant to blend at a distance. Signac took the new method outdoors and made a series of ten canvases along the water. Up close the river is thousands of small touches of unmixed paint; step back and it settles into light. He showed several of the Les Andelys pictures in Paris the next year, where the critic Felix Feneon, who had recently coined a name for the style, singled out their bright contrasts.