Les Andelys, Côte d'Aval

In May 1886 the Impressionists opened their eighth exhibition, which turned out to be their last, and the canvas everyone argued about was Seurat's Grande Jatte, built out of small separated touches of colour. Signac was 22 and showing in the same rooms. That June he left Paris for Les Andelys on the Seine, about 100 kilometres downriver, where chalk cliffs come down close to the water, and he worked the new method there on plain material. A bend of the river, moored boats, a cultivated hillside laid in as a run of flat trapezoids. In the autumn the critic Felix Feneon gave the method its name in print, neo-impressionism. Signac signed the canvas at the lower right, P. Signac 86.