The Seine at Samois (Study)

Signac painted this on the Seine at Samois, near Fontainebleau, in 1899, on a piece of card about the size of a sheet of writing paper. It belongs to a small group of studies of the same stretch of river taken at different hours. One is the river in the cool light of morning, another midday with the trees burning in the sun, another the deep blue of evening with the sunset lying on the water.

How it reached Munich is the better story. Hugo von Tschudi had run the Nationalgalerie in Berlin and spent years buying French modern painting over the objections of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who disliked it. He moved to Munich in 1909 to head the Bavarian state collections and went on buying, though public money could not be used for it. When he died in 1911 the bills were unsettled. His backers, among them the industrialist Eduard Arnhold and the banker Robert von Mendelssohn, paid for the pictures he had chosen and handed them to the state. This study came in on that donation in 1912.