Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde (La Bonne-Mère), Marseilles

Signac went to Marseille in late 1905 and painted this view afterwards in his studio, probably in the first months of 1906, although he signed it 1905. We look across the harbour toward the hill of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde, the church that sailors call the Good Mother. The colour goes on in small rectangular strokes of unmixed paint, set like tiles in a mosaic, which was Signac's own version of the dot method of his friend Seurat. The strong colours owe something to a summer in Saint-Tropez in 1904, when he worked alongside Henri-Edmond Cross and the young Matisse. By March 1906 the canvas was hanging at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris. Matisse showed The Joy of Life at the same salon, and in January Signac had written that Matisse, whose work he had liked until then, seemed to have gone to the dogs.