View of the Golden Horn in Constantinople

Signac sailed to Constantinople in the spring of 1907 with the painter Henri Person and stayed about six weeks. He worked outdoors in watercolour, quick notes of the harbour, and the oils came afterwards in his studio at Saint-Tropez, assembled from those notes in the small square touches he had used since the 1890s. What he recorded is the working water of the Golden Horn, caiques and the masts of moored shipping, with the city behind, the domes of the New Mosque at the foot of the inlet and a tower on the ridge above. He was there a year before the revolution of 1908 forced the sultan to restore the constitution. The painting hangs in Lodz, in a museum whose modern collection was assembled from 1931 by a group of Polish avant-garde artists out of works the artists themselves gave.