La Rochelle, Leaving the Harbour

Paul Signac was a passionate sailor, and he painted harbours the way other men keep diaries. La Rochelle, on the Atlantic coast, was one of the ports he returned to. With his friend Georges Seurat he had worked out a method of laying pure colours side by side in small separate touches, so the eye mixes them at a distance. By 1912, when he made this, those touches had grown into broad, brick-like blocks, more mosaic than dot. A boat leaves the old harbour beneath its two medieval towers, the water built up from squares of blue, green and rose. Seurat had died young in 1891, and Signac carried the method on for another 40 years.