Road to Gennevilliers

In 1883 Paul Signac was 20 and entirely self-taught. What he'd been teaching himself from was Monet, whose canvases he first saw in 1880 in the offices of a Paris magazine, then again that spring at the Durand-Ruel gallery. You can read that admiration here. The road runs out toward Gennevilliers, a working suburb north of Paris, though the factories are kept back on the horizon, and the foreground is laid down in broad flat zones of colour, the way Monet had painted the countryside a decade before. What the picture doesn't have yet is the technique Signac would soon be famous for. He met Georges Seurat the next year, and the two of them began breaking colour into the small separate touches of Neo-Impressionism. When he set up this road, that was still a year off.