Still life with book

Signac had been painting for about two years when he set this up. He was training as an architect until a Monet exhibition in Paris turned him, and in 1883 he was still working Monet's way, laying colour on in loose separate strokes. He had no teacher and no dealer. That changed the year after. At the first Salon des Indépendants in 1884 he met Georges Seurat, and within two years he was building his pictures out of small measured dots of unmixed colour, a system he went on defending in print for the rest of his life. A tabletop still life is a subject he had almost no use for later. He spent the remaining decades on harbours, rivers and boats.