Antibes, le soir

Signac painted this at Antibes in 1914, months before the war, working the oil up in the studio from watercolours made on the spot, which was his habit by then. He had been moving along the Mediterranean coast for 20 years, always with a boat somewhere nearby, and the touch here is his late manner, square tiles of colour set side by side, far broader than the small dots he and Seurat had used in the 1880s. In August the fighting began. Signac was an anarchist and a convinced pacifist, and it stopped him almost completely. He painted very little for the next two years, and spent much of the war at Antibes.