Marseille, The pink tower

Signac painted this view of the harbour entrance at Marseille in 1913, and within a year it had a German owner. The city art museum of Essen, in the industrial Ruhr, bought it in 1914, the same year France and Germany went to war. By this point his dots had grown into square tiles of colour laid side by side, and they build everything here, the pink tower at the mouth of the port, the masts crowding behind it, a flag snapping on a big sailing ship and a white sail cutting across the water on the left. Signac already had a German champion in the collector Karl Ernst Osthaus, whose Folkwang museum in Hagen had been buying his work since 1901. After Osthaus died, Essen acquired that collection too and merged the two museums, and since 1922 this canvas has belonged to the Museum Folkwang.