O Pinheiro em Saint-Tropez

Signac moved to the fishing port of Saint-Tropez in the 1890s, and this great umbrella pine near the town became one of his favourite subjects. He builds it up in 1909 from separate blocks of pure colour laid on like mosaic tiles, orange and yellow in the sunlit canopy, cool blue and violet in the shade beneath, a technique he had inherited from his friend Georges Seurat and by now made looser and warmer. The reason it hangs in Moscow is a story in itself: the Russian textile magnate Sergei Shchukin bought it before the First World War, and after the 1917 revolution the state seized his collection. The pine has stayed in Russia ever since.