View of Collioure

Collioure is a small port on the Mediterranean, tucked against the foothills of the Pyrenees near the Spanish border, and in 1887 Signac travelled south to paint its light. This is among his first real encounters with the Mediterranean, and he had firm ideas about that light, saying the southern sun fades the shadows, tempers the local colours and thins out the clear sky. You can watch him testing that here in the deliberately pale, high-keyed range of the whole view, built from small separate touches of unmixed colour left to blend in the eye rather than on the palette. The shadows are drained of weight and the sky kept thin and bleached, which is exactly the effect the southern sun had led him to chase.