Comblat-le-Château, The Valley

In the summer of 1887 the dot was still a brand-new idea. Georges Seurat had shown his huge Sunday crowd on the Grande Jatte only a year before, and Paul Signac, then 24, was one of the few painters willing to build an entire landscape from separate touches of pure colour. He carried the method far from Paris, up into the Auvergne, to the small village of Comblat-le-Château in the old volcanic hills of the Cantal. This valley is one of several canvases he brought back from that stay. Like a composer, he gave these pictures opus numbers instead of ordinary titles, treating a hillside the way a musician treats a theme. The greens and violets in it were never mixed on the palette. Signac set them side by side as small dots and left them to blend in the eye of anyone standing back from the canvas.