Tartans with Flags

By 1893 Signac had left Paris behind for Saint-Tropez, a fishing village on the Mediterranean he'd sailed into the year before and decided to stay in. The boats here are tartanes, the small local craft, dressed overall in flags for a harbour festival, and he built them into a tight triangle he worked out across three separate studies. The colour is laid down in his usual small, deliberate touches of unmixed paint. What happened to the canvas afterward says a lot about the decade. Around 1895, with cycling the new craze all over France, Signac, a restless sportsman, traded it away for a bicycle. It surfaced again in 1910, when a museum in Wuppertal in Germany bought it, the first of his paintings to enter a public collection, and a German one at that, years before the war would set the two countries against each other.