Setting Sun, Sardine Fishing, Concarneau

Signac gave this painting a title borrowed from music — Adagio, Opus 221 — one of a series he made at the Breton fishing port of Concarneau, watching the sardine boats put out under a low sun. He built the scene from small separate dots of pure colour, the Neo-Impressionist method meant to mix in the viewer's eye rather than on the canvas. The opus numbers were his own habit, a way of cataloguing his canvases as if they were compositions. He painted this in 1891, the year Georges Seurat, who had worked out that dotted technique with him, died suddenly at 31, leaving Signac to carry a movement only a few years old.