Paul Signac

Signac met Georges Seurat in 1884 and the two of them worked out, over the next few years, a method of painting in small dots of pure, unmixed color, placed so that the eye rather than the brush would do the blending. They called it divisionism; critics called it pointillism. When Seurat died suddenly in 1891 at only 31, Signac was the one who kept the technique going, writing a book on its theory and mentoring the next generation, including a young Henri Matisse.

Sailing shaped what he painted as much as any theory did. Signac kept a boat and worked his way along the Mediterranean coast, docking for weeks at a time in a fishing village called Saint-Tropez that was barely known before he started painting its harbor in dots of color, drawing other artists there after him.

He was also an anarchist, part of a circle that included the critic Félix Fénéon and fellow painter Camille Pissarro, though his politics stayed mostly on the page rather than in the street. He served as president of the Salon des Indépendants, the exhibition society with no jury and no prizes, for nearly three decades, from 1908 until his death in 1935.