L'Entrée du port de Marseille

By 1911 Paul Signac was the elder of a movement most people already thought of as finished. Georges Seurat, who had invented the tiny-dot method alongside him, had died 20 years earlier, and Signac had let the dots grow into a loose mosaic of bright, separate tiles. He was also a serious sailor who owned a string of boats and painted harbours up and down the French coast. Here the sailboats crowd the mouth of the port of Marseille under a sky worked almost entirely in pink and blue, the water broken into those small blocks of unmixed colour. The French state bought the canvas in 1920.