朝食

Signac painted this over 1886 and 1887, just as he and Georges Seurat were turning Impressionism into something more exacting. Seurat's huge Grande Jatte had gone on show in 1886, built from countless small dots of pure colour, and the young Signac took up the same painstaking method. Here he applies it to his own family at the breakfast table: his grandfather Jules seated in the foreground, his mother to the left with a cup of tea, a maid standing by. Strong window light rakes across the room and hardens every edge. What strikes you is the stillness. None of the three figures looks at or speaks to another. The picture, sometimes called The Dining Room, now hangs in the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands.