Asnières, Bank of the Seine

The far bank, where factory chimneys send smoke into the sky, is Clichy, on the edge of Paris. The near one is Asnières, the riverside town where the painter's family had gone to live after his father's death, and he signed this view P. Signac 85 in the lower right corner. The trees along the embankment are bare, with only a few people out walking. The museum in Saitama reads the reddish glow at the left of the sky, repeated on the water, as morning. His touches are smaller here than in his canvases of a few years before, though they are still short strokes. The separate dots came in 1886. That May he sent this picture to the eighth Impressionist exhibition in Paris, one of 18 works he showed there, and afterwards it was handed down in his family from one generation to the next before it came to Saitama.