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Lot Essay
Signac first visited St.-Tropez in 1892, arriving in the harbor of this small fishing village in his sailboat, at a time when the town was difficult to reach by land routes. The artist was drawn to the port's picturesque Moorish architecture and the enclosed harbor filled with small sailing craft. Signac spent part of every year there until the First World War, and his presence attracted other artists such as Matisse and Bonnard.
The fan-shaped format of the present work is rare in Signac's oeuvre, and was somewhat old-fashioned when the artist employed this design in the last decade of the nineteenth century. He is perhaps paying homage to the earlier generation of Impressionists. Degas had painted fans and asked his colleagues to contribute their own efforts to the fourth Impressionist exhibition in 1879, where they were to be exhibited in a special room; but as it turned out only Forain and Pissarro obliged. The latter provided a dozen works, recapping a number of earlier themes from his paintings, and they proved to be very salable.
Signac was also interested in the compositional possibilities inherent in the fan shape, which encourages a japoniste approach utilizing steep transitions between strongly demarcated fore- and backgrounds. The fan shape is not merely decorative: it also approximates the viewer's field of vision as he takes in a panoramic vista, and is a form of wide-angle composition. The central and distant horizon stands high at the center; the peripheral elements sit lower in the wings; and the absent center foreground is literally the area beneath the viewer's nose. In this space, covered by the framer's mat, the artist has tested his brushes and done some color exercises.
The fan-shaped format of the present work is rare in Signac's oeuvre, and was somewhat old-fashioned when the artist employed this design in the last decade of the nineteenth century. He is perhaps paying homage to the earlier generation of Impressionists. Degas had painted fans and asked his colleagues to contribute their own efforts to the fourth Impressionist exhibition in 1879, where they were to be exhibited in a special room; but as it turned out only Forain and Pissarro obliged. The latter provided a dozen works, recapping a number of earlier themes from his paintings, and they proved to be very salable.
Signac was also interested in the compositional possibilities inherent in the fan shape, which encourages a japoniste approach utilizing steep transitions between strongly demarcated fore- and backgrounds. The fan shape is not merely decorative: it also approximates the viewer's field of vision as he takes in a panoramic vista, and is a form of wide-angle composition. The central and distant horizon stands high at the center; the peripheral elements sit lower in the wings; and the absent center foreground is literally the area beneath the viewer's nose. In this space, covered by the framer's mat, the artist has tested his brushes and done some color exercises.