The Château Gaillard, View from My Window, Petit-Andely

The ruin on the hilltop is Château Gaillard. Richard the Lionheart, king of England and duke of Normandy, built it between 1196 and 1198 to block the French king Philip II's way into Normandy along the Seine. It held for only six years. Philip's army took it in March 1204 after a long siege. Nearly seven centuries later, in the summer of 1886, Signac was staying in Petit-Andely, the town at the foot of the rock, and this is the view from his window, over a brick house and a screen of trees. He was 22 and still finding his way with the new method of separate touches of pure colour, short regular dashes in the sky, looser green dabs in the leaves. He painted on bare, unprimed canvas over a drawing in dark crayon that still shows along some edges. Of the ten pictures he made there that summer, this is the only one that leaves out the Seine.