The Seine at Samois (Study)

1899 was the year Signac put his argument into print. His book tracing divided colour back to Delacroix came out in Paris, making the case that pure tones set side by side and mixed by the eye read brighter than colours stirred together on the palette. It also made him the public voice of a movement whose founder, Georges Seurat, had been dead for eight years. That autumn Signac went to Samois on the Seine, upstream of Paris near the Fontainebleau forest, and worked through a run of small studies of the river. This is one of them, oil on a board about 27 by 35 centimetres. The colour goes on in thick rectangular tiles over a thinner underpainting, each touch angled to follow the thing it describes, so the water is stroked one way and the bank another.