Gasometers at Clichy

Signac painted this in March and April 1886, in the industrial belt just outside Paris, where his family had moved in 1880. Clichy and Asnieres were factory country, cranes and chimneys and the big iron gas holders that stored the coal gas lighting the city. Parisians with money did not go out there for the view.

It is the first canvas he painted by the new method, small separate touches of unmixed colour set side by side so that the mixing happens in the eye rather than on the palette. A few weeks later the eighth and last Impressionist exhibition opened in Paris, with the new dotted pictures hung together in a room of their own.

It reached Melbourne through the Felton Bequest, the fund that has been buying pictures for the gallery since 1904.