Two Milliners, rue du Caire

Paul Signac was barely 22 when he worked on this, in 1885 and 1886, and the timing matters, because he was about to help invent a new way of painting. In 1886 he and Georges Seurat showed at the last Impressionist exhibition in Paris, where Seurat unveiled his huge Grande Jatte and the public first met the dotted technique that became Neo-Impressionism. Here two hat-makers work late in a cramped Paris workroom off the rue du Caire, in the garment quarter, their faces lit by a lamp. Signac is still building the picture in small separate touches of colour rather than blended strokes. He paints the women at their labour, heads down, in the ordinary evening light of the work.