Quai de Clichy. Graues Wetter

In the spring of 1887 Paul Signac set up along the Seine at Clichy, on the northwestern edge of Paris, close to where his family had moved a few years before. He was in his mid-twenties and fully committed to the new technique he and Georges Seurat were developing, building an image out of small separate dots of pure color that the eye blends at a distance. That grey-weather river is made entirely of those touches. Working the same riverbanks that year was another recent arrival to Paris, Vincent van Gogh, who joined Signac on painting trips around Clichy and Asnières. The canvas later disappeared into the private hoard of the German dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt, and surfaced only in 2012, in an apartment in Munich.