Interpretive Resource

Paul Signac dabbled with Impressionism early in his career, but in 1884 he saw the work of Georges Seurat at the first Salon des indépendants (an exhibition forum that Signac had cofounded as an alternative to the official Salon). That year Seurat exhibited Bathers at Asnières (1884; London, National Gallery), a painting that reveals the beginnings of his "scientific" technique, according to which colors are divided from one another in order to enhance their optical effect. Signac’s encounter with Neo-Impressionism proved decisive for his subsequent career; he soon adopted Seurat’s method, and a mutually rewarding exchange ensued between the two artists.

The largest and most technically refined of a series of landscapes that Signac painted in the summer of 1886, Les Andelys, Côte d’Aval depicts a placid, sun-drenched village nestled along the winding bank of the Seine, near Rouen. Seurat’s work provided a model for the innovative spatial recession seen here: Signac established insistent connections between compositional elements such as a cropped boat in the lower-left corner; its anchor, which leads the viewer’s eye to the middle ground; and the unpopulated, toylike village in the distance, dominated by a church steeple at the right. Signac’s abbreviated, discrete strokes also seem to echo those of his colleague, for example in the patchwork hillside. But in the sky, he began with a more broadly brushed underlayer, suggesting that he had not fully relinquished the intuitive approach to color and handling so central to Impressionism.

Signac published an important and influential tract on Neo-Impressionism in 1891 and is widely regarded as the central disseminator of the group’s aesthetic theories. Among the artists whom he persuaded to experiment with the style were Camille Pissarro and Vincent van Gogh.