Schnee, Boulevard de Clichy, Paris

Signac dated this January 1886 and numbered it 128, giving his canvases opus numbers the way a composer numbers pieces. Four months later the eighth and last Impressionist exhibition opened in Paris, and the new dotted method went public there in a room of its own. This canvas comes from just before that, and the method arrives in it in patches. The wall of the house at the right has broken up into separate touches of pure colour while much of the snow and sky is still laid on in ordinary Impressionist strokes. The street is the boulevard de Clichy at the foot of Montmartre, under snow, with the traffic reduced to dark marks. The museum in Minneapolis that has owned it since 1961 calls it his first pointillist canvas.