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Lot Essay
This work will be included in a forthcoming volume of the Signac catalogue raisonné.
An exhibition of works by Claude Monet held on the premises of La Vie moderne in June 1880 had a profound effect on the then sixteen-year-old Paul Signac. Whereas he had previously enjoyed visiting dealers and exhibitions in the art student's quarter near his home on the Avenue Frochot, close to Montmartre, he now was determined to become an artist and the route he intended to follow was that of the Impressionist avant-garde, taking Monet, as well as Gustave Caillebotte and Armand Guillaumin, as his guiding lights. Despite his lack of formal training, he produced a successful series of brilliantly colored impressionist landscape studies in 1881-1884. For his first landscapes, Signac chose to depict sights that were familiar to him. His family house in Asnières, a northwestern suburb of Paris, offered a superb range of vistas: from garden views to glances of the Seine as well as the developing industrial areas of the nearby eastern suburb of Clichy with its factories, rails and roadways.
A more mature painting than his very early studies, La fête d'Asnières illustrates Signac's mastery of composition and lighting as well as his increased artistic confidence. He achieves a luminescence through his use of blonde tonalities specifically in the left side of the painting. The influence of the impressionists is clearly manifest in the juxtaposition of the yellows and deep blues, the light brushstrokes that compose the flags swaying in the breeze and the luminosity of the bright blue sky. La fête d'Asnières is both reminiscent of Alfred Sisley's work with its clear brushwork but is also noteworthy for its anticipation of Signac's collaboration with George Seurat in the following year--by 1885, Signac had succeeded in persuading Seurat to remove earth pigments from his palette and adopt a Divionisist handling of paint. In the present painting, the lavender shadows to the right of the painting are comprised of small strokes of color, foreshadowing Signac's eventual abandonment of traditional coloristic application.
La fête d'Asnières is dedictated to the writer and critic Paul Adam. Signac was introduced to literary circles through his childhood friend, Charles Torquer. The group gatherings at Brasserie Gambrinus also included the writers Jean Ajalbert, Joris Karl Huysmans, and Paul Alexis as well as the critics Félix Fénéon and Gustave Kahn. These writers would later firmly support the Neo-Impressionist movement which supplanted the romantic Impressionism of Monet and Sisley with the newly formed theories and divisionistic techniques developed by Georges Seurat and embraced by Signac.
An exhibition of works by Claude Monet held on the premises of La Vie moderne in June 1880 had a profound effect on the then sixteen-year-old Paul Signac. Whereas he had previously enjoyed visiting dealers and exhibitions in the art student's quarter near his home on the Avenue Frochot, close to Montmartre, he now was determined to become an artist and the route he intended to follow was that of the Impressionist avant-garde, taking Monet, as well as Gustave Caillebotte and Armand Guillaumin, as his guiding lights. Despite his lack of formal training, he produced a successful series of brilliantly colored impressionist landscape studies in 1881-1884. For his first landscapes, Signac chose to depict sights that were familiar to him. His family house in Asnières, a northwestern suburb of Paris, offered a superb range of vistas: from garden views to glances of the Seine as well as the developing industrial areas of the nearby eastern suburb of Clichy with its factories, rails and roadways.
A more mature painting than his very early studies, La fête d'Asnières illustrates Signac's mastery of composition and lighting as well as his increased artistic confidence. He achieves a luminescence through his use of blonde tonalities specifically in the left side of the painting. The influence of the impressionists is clearly manifest in the juxtaposition of the yellows and deep blues, the light brushstrokes that compose the flags swaying in the breeze and the luminosity of the bright blue sky. La fête d'Asnières is both reminiscent of Alfred Sisley's work with its clear brushwork but is also noteworthy for its anticipation of Signac's collaboration with George Seurat in the following year--by 1885, Signac had succeeded in persuading Seurat to remove earth pigments from his palette and adopt a Divionisist handling of paint. In the present painting, the lavender shadows to the right of the painting are comprised of small strokes of color, foreshadowing Signac's eventual abandonment of traditional coloristic application.
La fête d'Asnières is dedictated to the writer and critic Paul Adam. Signac was introduced to literary circles through his childhood friend, Charles Torquer. The group gatherings at Brasserie Gambrinus also included the writers Jean Ajalbert, Joris Karl Huysmans, and Paul Alexis as well as the critics Félix Fénéon and Gustave Kahn. These writers would later firmly support the Neo-Impressionist movement which supplanted the romantic Impressionism of Monet and Sisley with the newly formed theories and divisionistic techniques developed by Georges Seurat and embraced by Signac.