Voiles Dans la Brume. Canal de la Giudecca

Signac reached Venice for the first time in the middle of April 1904 and stayed about a month. He had come partly on the strength of Ruskin's Stones of Venice, and he worked the way he always worked when travelling, in watercolour. More than 200 sheets came home with him and not one oil painting. The oils were made afterwards, indoors, from those notes, which is why the separate touches of colour sit in such an even and deliberate mosaic. The Giudecca canal is the deep channel between the Giudecca island and the rest of the city, wide enough for large shipping, and the sails in the haze belong to the working boats that shared it. Signac was still turning that month of paper into canvases years later.