Сен-Бриак, Ле-Беше

Signac was 21 when he painted this at Saint-Briac, a small resort on the Brittany coast where he spent several summers in the mid-1880s. Le Bechet was one of the inlets there. At this point he was still painting as an Impressionist, laying down loose, bright strokes of the kind he admired in Monet. That was about to change. In 1884 he had met Georges Seurat, and within a year or two the two of them would work out the disciplined dot-by-dot method that became Neo-Impressionism. A canvas like this Breton coast, made just before that shift, shows the freer hand he started from. He returned to Saint-Briac often, and its rocks and channels fill a whole run of his early pictures.