Calanque

Signac first sailed into Saint-Tropez in 1892, when it was a fishing village reached mainly by boat, and he ended up buying a house above the bay. This canvas was painted there in 1906. By then his brushwork had grown into broad blocks of colour set side by side like tiles, much coarser than the fine points he and Seurat had worked with in the 1880s. It went north to Belgium. Anna Boch, a Belgian painter who belonged to the avant-garde group Les XX in Brussels and bought new work when few others would, owned it and left it to the Belgian state in 1937. On the back of the canvas Signac wrote the place and the year.