Entrance of La Rochelle Harbor

The two towers at the mouth of this harbour are medieval, and a chain used to be slung between them at night to shut La Rochelle off from the sea. That is how one of them got its name, the Tour de la Chaîne. Signac painted the view in 1921, when he was 57 and running the Société des Artistes Indépendants in Paris, at whose Salon this canvas appeared the following spring. A picture like this looks quickly made. This one was assembled in stages. He worked up a watercolour in front of the harbour, which is now in New York, then a drawing squared for transfer, then a full-size cartoon, and only after all that the painting, over one and a half metres wide. The colour sits on it in separate blocks of touch that pull together into water and sky at a distance.