Woman with a Parasol

The woman is Berthe Robles, a distant cousin of Camille Pissarro, whom Signac had met in the early 1880s around the Chat Noir cabaret and married in November 1892. He painted her a few months after the wedding, in profile under her parasol.

Women with parasols were by then an Impressionist fixture. Monet had painted his wife that way, and the motif had been repeated until it was almost a signature of the group. Signac took it up again and did it with the dots, colours set down separately so the blending happens in the viewer's eye.

Finished portraits are rare in his work. This one closes a small run of them he made of his family and closest friends.