Fort du Roule, Cherbourg

In December 1928 Signac told his patron Gaston Levy about a plan: he would sail to a hundred French ports and paint watercolours in every one of them, two in each, one for Levy and one for himself. He kept to it, working the Mediterranean, then Brittany, then along the Channel through 1930, and finished the series in 1931. Cherbourg was one of the Channel stops, with the fort on the rock of Le Roule standing over the harbour. The oil came afterwards, in 1932, worked up in the studio from the paper he had brought home, in the small separated touches he had been using since the 1880s. He was 68 and had by then been president of the Societe des Artistes Independants, the exhibiting society with no jury, for more than 20 years.