Paul Signac Notre-Dame-De-La-Garde Luminaries

Paul Signac (1863-1935) originally studied architecture until at the age of 18, he attended an exhibition of Claude Monet’s work, and was inspired to pursue a career in painting. At the age of 21, he met Georges Seurat and was intrigued by the artist’s working methods and color theories. Working together, they developed Pointillism, the juxtaposition of small dots of pure color scientifically placed that would blend only in the eye of the observer. He would later dub this genre of painting Neo-Impressionism.

An avid sailor, he visited many seaports in France which often became the subject matter of his work. In “Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde, Marseilles,” he approaches the subject from the entrance to the harbor crowded with vessels, their sails furled, with the distant cathedral on the hill shrouded in a pink haze of twilight. The vivid colors, applied in rectangular dashes as a variation on the pointillist method, are reproduced on our artful Luminaries.