Castle of Comblat

In the summer of 1887 a family errand took Signac to the Auvergne. He was escorting a cousin to Comblat-le-Château, a village in the hills above Aurillac, and he had gone reluctantly. The country won him over. He stayed through June and July and came away with some seven canvases of the château and its park. He was 24 and had been working for about two years in Seurat's method of separate small touches, letting the colours mix in the eye instead of on the palette, which is why the surface here resolves into dots as you walk up to it. The picture is in Liège, in the building on the island in the Meuse that was put up for the world's fair of 1905 and reopened in 2016 as La Boverie.