Il porto di Saint-Tropez

Signac started this view of the whole harbour in 1901 and was still at it early the next year, and by then he had let go of the original point of pointillism, the idea that small dots of pure colour would mix in the viewer's eye. He made the touches bigger and set them against one another instead, so the water reads as separate blocks you could almost count. He showed it at the Independants in Paris in 1902. It went early to Karl Ernst Osthaus, a young heir to a Ruhr banking fortune who was then filling his new Folkwang museum in the industrial town of Hagen with French painting barely dry. The collection moved to Essen in 1922, the picture left the museum later on, and the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo bought it in 1988.