L’Hirondelle Steamer on the Seine

Signac spent the autumn of 1901 on the Seine at Samois, a village upstream from Paris where the river runs wide and slow, and painted this in morning mist. The subject is a working boat. Steamers like L'Hirondelle carried passengers and towed barges along the river, and their smoke was part of the weather on the Seine at the time. He also called the picture Brume du matin, morning fog, which names the problem he had set himself, a scene with no firm edges built out of separate touches of unmixed colour. The steamer sits in the middle of it with its smoke trailing off into the haze. The water around it is laid in short horizontal strokes rather than dots, the broader mosaic Signac had been moving toward since the mid-1890s.