Saint-Tropez, Calm

In the summer of 1895 Signac was keeping a journal at Saint-Tropez, and it shows how slowly his big pictures came together. He spent weeks working out colour harmonies before he began his dotted canvas of the harbour, The Red Buoy, on 22 August. This little panel belongs to the other side of that routine. It is only 27 centimetres wide, painted in oil on wood, and the paint goes on in thick, broken strokes rather than the patient dots the public knew him for. The bay lies pale and flat under a streaked sky, a low line of hills runs across the far shore, and a couple of rocks sit in the water catching orange light. The title simply records the weather that day. The panel belongs to the Fondation Corboud, the collection of the Swiss collector Gérard Corboud, which has been on permanent loan to the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne since 2001.