Domingo

Signac built this the slow way, dot by dot, in the pointillist method he and Seurat had worked out from colour theory, small separate touches of pure colour that the eye is meant to blend at a distance. But the subject is cooler than the sunlit harbours he usually painted. A well-off couple share a Sunday indoors and share nothing else. He crouches at the fireplace with his back to us, she stands at the window staring out, the two of them pointedly turned away from each other in a stiff, over-furnished room. Signac was an anarchist by conviction and had little patience for bourgeois comfort, and it shows here. When he exhibited the picture in 1890 the critics disliked it, put off by the dark tones and the deadened, motionless pair.