The Ponton de la Félicité at Asnières

In the 1880s Asnières was where Paris went on a Sunday. Excursion steamers came down the Seine from the city and set their passengers ashore, while the same stretch of bank was filling up with workshops and factories. La Félicité was one of those boats, well known at the time, and what Signac painted is its landing stage out on the water, built up from small separate touches of unmixed colour that the eye is left to combine. The canvas is a modest one, roughly 33 by 47 centimetres. He sent it to the Salon des Indépendants in Paris in 1887, the exhibition that ran without a jury, and Vincent van Gogh, newly arrived in the city and much taken with Signac's handling of paint, may well have seen it there.