Pronounce the artist’s name: See – nyack’
In 1892 Paul Signac moved to Saint Tropez, in the sough south of France. He found the subject of this work, a giant umbrella pine, on the property of “a Monsieur Bonaventure” whose villa was located outside Saint Tropez. To Signac, the large, spreading tree represented security, strength, and shelter. The majestic tree rises in a sparkling landscape with water, sailboats, and mountains in the distance.
The spreading umbrella pine dominates the composition. In this tree, Signac found the linear rhythms and abstract forms that he admired in Japanese art. The outline of the entire tree sets the undulating rhythm of the painting. Curving forms are repeated in the lines of the branches and in the small clumps of leaves. Other landscape elements are simplified to offset the complex intertwining of tree limbs and leaves, and at the same time to repeat the overall curving shape.
Signac’s method of painting is called Divisionism or Pointillism. The term “Pointillism” refers to the small “points” or uniform dots of color, uniform in size, that Signac applied to the canvas. The term “Divisionism” refers to Signac’s “dividing” of color into its parts. According to Divisionist theory, when two colors are placed next to each other, the eye mixes them to form a third color. For instance, the viewer’s eye combines the red and blue dots in the lower left corner of this painting to create purple. However, the dots do not completely merge. Instead, their juxtaposition creates a vibration that suggests sparkling sunlight. As Signac wrote in 1884, “I paint like this because it is the technique that seems to me best suited to give the most harmonious, the most luminous, the most colorful result”.1
Paul Signac was born in 1863 in Paris, where his father was a successful saddler. After visiting the 1880 Impressionist exhibition, Signac decided to become an Impressionist painter. He worked briefly with a teacher, but basically taught himself by painting outdoors along the Seine River. In 1884 Signac met Georges Seurat, who was developing Divisionism, a style intended to make Impressionism more scientific. Signac adopted Divisionism and, after Seurat’s death in 1891, became the leading proponent of this style of painting. His successful career as a painter was complemented by his writings on art, including a number of important books and articles on nineteenth-century French painting.
1. Quoted in Floyd Ratliff, Paul Signac and Color in Neo-Impressionism
(New York: The Rockefeller University Press, 1992), p. 192.
