The Seine at Mantes

This is a river, not the sea, which is worth noticing in a painter who spent most of his life chasing coastlines. In 1899 Signac worked on the Seine at Mantes, a town about 50 kilometres west of Paris, where the river bends beneath a large Gothic collegiate church begun in the 12th century. He rendered it in his broad neo-impressionist touch, water and pale stone alike broken into separate strokes of colour left to fuse in the eye. The place was already well trodden in painting. Corot had set up here decades before, and his views of the bridge and church at Mantes were widely loved, so Signac was working a motif an older landscape master had made famous long before him.