Venise, le nuage rose

Signac first went to Venice in the spring of 1904 and painted no oils there at all. He made more than 200 watercolours instead, quick notes of water, hulls and weather, and built the pictures up months later in his studio. He returned in the spring of 1908, and this canvas followed in 1909. By then the small dots he had taken over from Seurat in the 1880s had grown into broad rectangular touches set side by side like tesserae. Its other title is Anchorage at the Giudecca, the wide channel on the south side of the city where working boats moored. The painting belongs to the Batliner collection, on long-term loan to the Albertina in Vienna since 2007.