Samois, the riverbank, morning

By 1901, when Paul Signac painted this stretch of the Seine at Samois, just downstream from Fontainebleau, the Neo-Impressionist method he had worked out with Georges Seurat was already more than a decade old, and Seurat himself had been dead for ten years. Signac kept it alive. He paints here in divisionism, laying down small separate touches of pure color meant to blend in the viewer's eye rather than on the palette, so the morning light on the water is built up from countless tiny blocks. He had spent several weeks at Samois around 1900, and the place absorbed him. He came away with roughly 200 watercolors of it, a handful of oil studies, and only about six finished canvases like this one. By then Signac was living down on the Mediterranean at Saint-Tropez, where he sailed constantly and worked more and more in watercolor.