Thonier à Concarneau

Signac spent the summer of 1891 at Concarneau, on the south coast of Brittany, and came away with a group of canvases he numbered and marked like music, opus 219 through 222, with tempos attached, larghetto, allegro maestoso, adagio. What fills them is the sardine fleet, which was what the town lived on.

Then the sardines failed. The shoals thinned after 1902, the crisis in the fishery ran for years, and Concarneau rebuilt itself around tuna until it was the busiest tuna port on the French Atlantic coast. Signac came back in 1925 to a harbour working a different fish.

His painting had moved on as well. The separate dots of the 1880s had thickened into small squarish touches laid like mosaic, and the Artizon Museum in Tokyo, which owns the canvas, describes the pale blue, pink, orange and yellow he built the port out of.