The Pont-Neuf, Paris

By 1931 Paul Signac was in his late 60s, and the technique he had helped invent with Georges Seurat back in the 1880s, building a picture from separate touches of colour, was nearly half a century old. Here he turns it on the Pont-Neuf, whose name means the New Bridge though it is in fact the oldest bridge still standing in Paris, finished in 1607 under Henri the Fourth. It was the first bridge in the city built with no houses crowding its sides, so Parisians could stop on it and look at the river. Signac lays it down in loose mosaic dabs, the Seine broken into flecks of light. He would die four years later, in 1935, in the same city where he had been born.