Le Pont des Arts

By 1925 Signac was 62 and had spent 17 years running the Salon des Indépendants, the exhibition that refused to have a jury. He kept an apartment in Paris and painted the Seine from the right bank constantly. This is the view downriver, with the Pont des Arts crossing the picture and the towers of Notre-Dame and the spire of the Sainte-Chapelle standing up behind it. The small dots of his younger years have grown into broad blocks of colour laid side by side. Louis Vauxcelles, the critic who had coined the words fauves and cubism as insults, saw it on exhibition that year and called it an outburst of freshness and youthful energy. The footbridge he painted is no longer there. That cast-iron span went up in 1804 as the first iron bridge in Paris, took repeated knocks from barges, and part of it fell into the river in 1979. What crosses at that spot today is a steel replacement.