La Neige, Bois-Colombes

Signac's early pictures of suburban Paris were greatly influenced by the Impressionists, and by Monet and Sisley in particular. He began exhibiting his work in the mid 1880s and was a founder member of the Salon des Indépendants. It was there that he first encountered Georges Seurat, with whom he was to develop theories of colour division and Pointillism. Both artists were invited by Pissarro to take part in the Eighth Impressionist exhibition of 1886. Signac exhibited eighteen pictures, including L'embranchement de Bois-Colombes (fig. 1), which clearly shows the influence of Seurat in the use of saturated colours and the Pointillist method. The present work, probably painted at the beginning of 1886, depicts the same view on a crisp winter's day, and is a more typically Impressionist work providing and interesting contrast to another winter scene of the same year La neige, Boulevard de Clichy (Fig. 2). In subject the present work is a testimony to the modern city landscape, complete with the great symbol of urbanism, the train, which provides the focal point of the composition.