사무아 습작 8번

1899 was the year Signac published his book, From Eugène Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism, which set out the case for painting in separate touches of pure colour and letting the eye do the mixing. He was in his mid-thirties and had become the spokesman for the method after Seurat died in 1891 at 31.

That same year he went to work at Samois, a village on the Seine upstream from Paris at the edge of the Fontainebleau forest, and made a run of small studies of the river. This is number eight. It measures about 27 by 35 centimetres, the size you can carry down to the bank and back.

By this date his touch had grown out of Seurat's fine dot into a broad squared-off block, so the water here reads as a mosaic of separate pieces.