Portrieux, the lighthouse

Signac gave his canvases opus numbers, like a composer, and this one is Opus 183. In the summer of 1888 at Portrieux, a fishing port on the north coast of Brittany, he painted a consecutive run, Opus 180 through 184, each taking a different part of the same small harbour. The subject here is the port's lighthouse, an octagonal tower built in 1867. He set it down in the fine, even dots of pure colour that he and his circle were refining just then, so the solid stone of the tower carries the same flecked, vibrating surface as the water and the sky around it. The canvases numbered just before and after it come from that same short summer stay.