Saint-Tropez, Storm

On 10 June 1895 Signac wrote down in his diary what he was starting. The houses of the port in full white light against the violet of a storm sky, and one small white sail so bright that it gave a sensation of terror. He wanted a harmony of green and violet with a great shaft of yellow light bursting through the clouds. He had first sailed into Saint-Tropez three years before, when it was a fishing town of a few thousand people most easily reached by boat, and he kept coming back every year. By 1895 he was laying the colour in broad square touches rather than the small dots of the 1880s. The painting returned to the town in 1993, bought for the museum in the old chapel of the Annonciade, a few minutes' walk from the quay.