Sunset, Herblay, Opus 206

Signac spent the summer of 1889 at Herblay, a village on the Seine downstream of Paris, while the city behind him was packed for the Exposition Universelle and its brand new iron tower. He rented a place there and worked the same stretch of river again and again at different hours. In the lower right corner he wrote Opus 206. He numbered his canvases the way a composer numbers scores, because he thought of painting as colours separated and then made to agree, which is roughly what a chord does. Here that means orange laid beside blue, so the sunset burns without any bright paint being mixed on the palette. The paint goes on in loose square dabs and patches rather than the tight round dots the technique is usually pictured with. The canvas reached Glasgow in 1976, accepted by the government in place of death duties.