Samois, Study No. 13, The Seine

The Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart bought this study in 1957, while its own building was still being rebuilt. Bombing in 1944 had left the gallery on Neckarstraße almost completely destroyed, and it did not reopen until 1958. The German modern paintings it had collected in the 1920s were long gone by then, seized in 1937 in the Nazi campaign against so-called degenerate art.

The picture itself goes back to the autumn of 1899, probably October, when Signac stayed at Samois, a village on the Seine at the edge of the Fontainebleau forest. He worked the river there in a numbered run of small oil studies on cardboard, each about 27 by 35 centimetres, and this one is number 13. Stuttgart calls it Morning on the Seine near Samois and dates it 1899 or 1900.