Les Bords de la Seine à Herblay

Signac numbered his canvases the way a composer numbers works, giving each one an opus number, because he wanted painting thought about the way music was, as something built out of measured intervals rather than copied off the world. This is one of a run he made at Herblay in 1889, a village on the Seine about 20 kilometres downstream from Paris, where he spent part of that year working the same stretch of river at different hours. The canvas is tiny, 33 centimetres by 55, the whole surface laid in separate touches of unmixed colour. That summer Paris was crowded with the Exposition Universelle and its brand new Eiffel Tower, and Signac, in his mid-twenties, was out at a quiet bend of the river. It was bought for the French state in 1958 with the help of his daughter Ginette, and later assigned to the Musee d'Orsay.