ラ・ロシェルの港

Signac painted this calm harbour in 1915, in the middle of a war that had all but stopped his brush. Between 1914 and 1917 he finished only seven canvases; the fighting depressed him badly, and the neat sunlit dots of his method sat oddly against the news from the front. That same year the French navy named him an official painter, which is partly why he was in La Rochelle at all, an old Atlantic port well away from the trenches. He builds the water and sky from small separate touches of colour that mix in your eye rather than on the canvas, the technique he and Georges Seurat had worked out decades before. The masts and their long reflections give the scene its quiet vertical order.