Montreuil town hall

Climb the main staircase of the town hall in Montreuil, just east of Paris, and you walk up beside a pointillist canvas some four metres wide. The building is first of all the seat of the local council, a Rationalist stone block with a 40-metre clock tower, designed by the architect Florent Nanquette and opened in 1935. The painting arrived in 1938, a gift to the town from the widow of Paul Signac, the leading Neo-Impressionist painter, who had died three years earlier.

Signac worked on In the Time of Harmony from 1893 to 1895, building a sunlit shore out of small dabs of pure colour. Its figures play boules, pick fruit, read and dance in a world without want, the future as an anarchist imagined it. He first called it In the Time of Anarchy and changed the title as the French state cracked down on anarchists in the mid-1890s. He offered it to the Belgian Workers' Party for its new Maison du Peuple in Brussels, yet the canvas stayed with him until his death. Since 1938 it has hung on the staircase, where it is protected as a historic monument.