Saint-Briac, La garde Guérin, Saint-Lunaire

In the spring of 1890 more than 1,100 Japanese prints and illustrated books went on show at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, in an exhibition put together by the dealer Siegfried Bing. That summer Signac was painting on the north coast of Brittany, at Saint-Briac, and the canvases he made there are usually read as a meeting of the Japanese print with the colour theory he was studying at the time. The title strings together three names from that shore: the village of Saint-Briac, the headland of La Garde Guérin, and the neighbouring resort of Saint-Lunaire. A broad slope of sunlit grass runs down to a curving bay, and the far shore is a thin line of rocks and pale houses under a wide sky. Signac numbered it Opus 211. It later belonged to the German collector Gustav Rau, who left his collection to UNICEF, and it is shown with that collection at the Arp Museum on the Rhine.