The Seine at Samois (Study)

Signac painted this on a piece of cardboard, outdoors, on a bend of the Seine at Samois below Fontainebleau in 1899. He went at the same stretch of water repeatedly that year, morning, midday and evening, in a run of about a dozen small studies, and Munich holds four of them. That it is in Munich at all comes down to Hugo von Tschudi. Running the national gallery in Berlin, he bought French modern painting until Wilhelm II ran out of patience with him, then moved south in 1909 to take charge of the Bavarian collections, and died two years later with a list of pictures he still meant to buy. In 1912 a circle of his friends, the banker Robert von Mendelssohn and the industrialist Eduard Arnhold among them, bought what was on the list and gave it to the Munich museums. This study came in with that gift.