Place des Lices, St. Tropez

In 1892 Paul Signac sailed his boat into Saint-Tropez, then an out-of-the-way fishing port on the Mediterranean, and liked it enough to buy a house and stay. This painting of the town's main square, the Place des Lices, comes from the next year. Signac was the chief theorist of Neo-Impressionism after the early death of his friend Georges Seurat, and he built the picture the way the movement demanded, out of small separate touches of unmixed colour that the eye blends at a distance. He paints the plane trees a startling blue against a yellow ground, and empties the square down to a single man resting by a bench. Painters kept following him south. Within a few years Matisse would spend a summer here and leave with the bright colours that led him toward Fauvism.