Clipper

Signac was 23 when he painted this, still working out a brand-new method. The year before, in 1886, Georges Seurat had shown his huge canvas A Sunday on La Grande Jatte and changed how younger painters thought about color, breaking it into separate touches that blend in the eye rather than on the palette. Signac took it up at once. Here he looks at the Seine at Asnieres, an industrial stretch of river on the edge of Paris framed by two bridges, the same water where Seurat had made his first experiments. You can watch him learning the technique. The sky in the upper third is worked in the small, deliberate dots the French called pointille, while the rest is built from careful contrasts of pink and blue, with a single orange-red sail to hold the eye. He even gave it an opus number, like a piece of music, inscribing Op. 155 at the lower right.