Two Cypresses

The full title tells you what to feel before you look: Two Cypresses, Mistral, Opus 241. The mistral is the hard, cold wind that pours down the Rhône valley and scours Provence for days at a time, and Signac has painted these two trees leaning under it. He had just settled in the south, at Saint-Tropez on the Mediterranean, in 1892. By then he was the leading Neo-Impressionist, building his pictures entirely from separate touches of pure colour. Up close they read as loose, detached dots, and a step back lets the eye fuse them into solid form. The word Opus is deliberate. Signac numbered his canvases the way a composer numbers works of music, and this is the 241st, colour meant to work on you slowly, the way harmony does. The two dark cypresses keep their shape against a sky he has broken into small flecks of blue and rose, still leaning in the wind that gave the painting its name.