Die Seine bei Saint-Cloud

In February 1901 a young German heir called Karl Ernst Osthaus walked into an exhibition at the Berlin gallery Keller and Reiner and bought this river view. He was assembling a collection for a museum he was building in the industrial town of Hagen, the Folkwang, which opened the following year, and this was the first Signac to enter a German public collection. Signac had painted it the year before, downstream from Paris at Saint-Cloud, with launches and small ferries on the water and the neo-Gothic church of Saint-Cloud standing above the bridge in the distance. Osthaus died in 1921 and the city of Essen bought the collection the next year, about 40 kilometres up the Ruhr from the town the picture had been bought for.