La playa del pueblo, Collioure, Opus 165

Signac spent part of 1887 at Collioure, a fishing village on the French Mediterranean near the Spanish border, and came back with four landscapes of it. This is one of them. The word Opus in the title is his own doing. For a few years in the 1880s he numbered his paintings the way a composer numbers works, which suited the ambition he shared with Seurat, to put painting on the footing of a science with rules that could be written down. The rule at work here is the small separate touches of colour set side by side so that they mix in the eye at a distance. The New York banker Robert Lehman bought the picture from a Paris dealer in 1950, and it came to the Metropolitan with the rest of his collection.