Femmes au puits III

In May 1892 Signac sailed into the fishing harbour of Saint-Tropez, on the Var coast, and decided to stay. He would spend half of every year there until 1913. This small panel belongs to that first summer. It is a study for a tall canvas of two women drawing water at a well, and the parts of the landscape are all really there, the hill with the citadel on top, the sea, the jetty of the port, the wooded Maures behind, rearranged to suit the picture. He used the back of the same board for a view of the harbour. The finished canvas went to the Indépendants in Paris in 1893 under the title Young Provençal Women at the Well, and the studies stayed with his daughter Ginette until they entered the French national collections in 1979.