Femmes au puits II

In May 1892 Signac sailed his boat Olympia into Saint-Tropez, then a fishing village most people reached by sea, and decided to stay. This small panel, 40 centimetres across, comes out of that first summer. The two women at the well began as one incident inside a much larger composition he was planning, and he lifted them out and gave them a picture of their own. The big canvas that grew from it went to the Salon des Indépendants the following spring under the title Young Provençal Women at the Well. Panel and canvas stayed in the family for almost 90 years, until the French national collections bought them both from his daughter Ginette in 1979.