View of the Seine at Herblay

By 1903 this small canvas was hanging in the Paris home of Edmond Cousturier, a critic, and his wife Lucie, a painter who had trained with Signac. He had given it to them himself. The same couple owned Seurat's Sunday on La Grande Jatte, which Lucie's father had bought for her in 1900, so Seurat's great canvas and this one hung in the same house. The Herblay view turns up in photographs of their rooms and in the background of a portrait of Lucie that the painter Maximilien Luce made in 1903.

Signac painted it in 1889 on the Seine at Herblay, a village downstream from Paris, and wrote Op. 203 in the lower left corner. In the water and the sky the pale grey priming of the canvas shows between the dots and dashes, which is where the silvery tone of the river comes from. Thin drawn lines still mark the water's edge and the crest of the hill. The collector Julia Appleton Bird bought the picture in New York in 1960 and gave it to the museum in 1980.