Port of Saint-Cast

In 1890 Signac spent time on the north coast of Brittany, at Saint-Cast, and painted the bay there four times. This is one of that group. He set up on the Plage du Châtelet and looked across the water toward the Pointe du Châtelet, the green headland on the right, with the old Fort La Latte a small shape on the far left of the horizon. By then Signac was numbering his canvases like pieces of music, and this one is Opus 209. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston suggests the habit of working in series may have come from Claude Monet, who was already returning to the same motif again and again. Signac sold the picture that same year to Victor Boch, a Belgian ceramics manufacturer. Six decades later, at an exhibition in Ostend in 1951, it was shown under the title “Saint-Tropez”, a Mediterranean harbour Signac first sailed into only in 1892.