Paul Signac: a leading light of Neo-Impressionism

Early in 1890, Paul Signac came close to having a duel with the Symbolist painter Henry de Groux. The latter had made disparaging remarks about Vincent van Gogh, calling his work ‘abominable’ and refusing to show in a group exhibition with him. Signac was a friend of the Dutchman’s, and ready to draw a sword on his behalf — only for those with cooler heads to intervene and ultimately keep the peace.

This anecdote reveals a number of things about Signac: not only that he was loyal to his pals, and had a shortish temper, but that he was part of a network of painters who transformed Western art in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Alongside Georges Seurat, he was the pioneer of a movement known as Neo-Impressionism (more on which below). His friend and fellow Neo-Impressionist Henri-Edmond Cross saw in Signac’s pictures ‘a play of hues as ravishing as happy combinations of gems’.

Early works indebted to the Impressionists

Signac was born in Paris in 1863. His family ran a successful chain of saddler’s shops and included Emperor Napoleon III among their clients. Young Paul’s brief studies in architecture were abandoned after he saw a solo exhibition by Claude Monet. His heart was now set upon becoming a painter.

He was largely self-taught, with a fondness for working en plein air on the banks of the River Seine. His early art was indebted to the Impressionists, and Signac was ejected from the fourth Impressionist exhibition for sketching from a work by Degas. (It was Paul Gauguin, one of the exhibiting artists, who did the ejecting — with some physical force — making clear that ‘one does not copy here, monsieur’.)

The Société des Artistes Indépendants

In 1884, Signac helped form the Société des Artistes Indépendants, an association that launched an annual exhibition named the Salon des Indépendants. This was intended for artists dissatisfied with the conservative submission policy of the official Salon (which was government-sponsored).

Seurat was also part of the association, and in the years ahead he and Signac set about exploring fresh ways of painting. They came to conclude that a rational order should be imposed on the Impressionists’ ostensibly haphazard impressions of colour and light.

Theories of optics and colour perception

The two artists engaged with recent theories on optics and colour perception by the likes of David Sutter, Ogden Rood and Michel Eugène Chevreul — the last of these a French chemist who stated that when two complementary colours are juxtaposed (such as blue and orange), they enhance one another.

At the core of Seurat and Signac’s practice was hue separation. A painter should avoid mixing colours on his or her palette, and instead apply small touches of pure colour to the canvas in a stippling effect, which the viewer’s retina would combine at a distance. This process might be laborious, but the benefit was thought to be a greater intensity of colour overall.

The Salon des Indépendants provided a perfect showcase for Neo-Impressionist efforts. The most famous example was Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884-86). One of Signac’s first works in the same vein was Gasometers at Clichy (1886), where a huddle of Parisian workers’ houses backs onto a row of giant gas containers.

A better-known Signac work from this period is The Dining Room, Opus 152 (1886-87), a domestic scene of a bourgeois man and woman sitting silently at a table while a maid brings them their post.

Such is the intricacy of technique that it’s hard to believe this was painted by the same man who had written to Monet earlier in the decade, begging to meet him for the first time — and seeking the ‘advice I so badly need, for the fact is I have the most horrible doubts’. (Monet didn’t take up the young artist’s request, but he and Signac did, years later, forge a long-term friendship.)

Neo-Impressionism or pointillism?

The term Neo-Impressionism was coined by the art critic Félix Fénéon in 1886. Many use it interchangeably with the alternative term pointillism, but Signac disliked the latter as it seemed to place a ‘trivialising’ focus on the painters’ dots (points in French).

The movement’s other adherents included the father and son Camille and Lucien Pissarro, the former a high-profile convert from Impressionism. Van Gogh was an admirer, too — and though not really adopting a Neo-Impressionist style himself, he did praise the ‘fresh revelation of colour’ it produced.

The impact of Seurat’s early death

Seurat was four years older than Signac, and tends to be regarded (not quite fairly) as having been the senior partner in their artistic relationship. Whatever the truth, his sudden death in 1891 — thought to have been from diphtheria, aged just 31 — left the younger artist as Neo-Impressionism’s torchbearer-in-chief.

At first, Signac struggled both personally and professionally. A keen sailor who owned 30 boats across his lifetime, he eventually decided to put some distance between himself and Paris. He set sail from Brittany for the south of France, where he happened to moor in a tiny fishing port on the Côte d’Azur called Saint-Tropez, then anything but the chic jet-set destination it is today.

In a letter to his mother, Signac declared himself ‘overjoyed’. Along with the bright Mediterranean light, he revelled in the ‘golden shores’, the ‘blue sea’ and the scenic hilly inland terrain, claiming ‘there is enough material to work on [here] for the rest of my days’.

Henceforth, he would live between Saint-Tropez and Paris, typically spending summers in the seaside village, based in a villa he purchased named La Hune. Some of Signac’s best-loved paintings — such as Le Port au soleil couchant, Opus 236 (Saint-Tropez), sold at Christie’s in 2019 — are views of the village and its surrounding areas.

Signac and anarchism

Back in Paris, Signac was associated with a number of anarchist figures — the likes of Jean Grave, Emile Pouget and the aforementioned Fénéon (who was briefly jailed, and later acquitted, for complicity in the murder of France’s president, Sadi Carnot, in 1894). Signac himself was no activist, but he did have a deeply held desire to transform society for the better. He felt that the correct action for painters in this regard was to keep innovating artistically. By pushing the medium forward, they would deal ‘a forceful pickaxe blow to the antiquated social structure’.

In Signac’s specific case, that blow was most forceful after 1891. Which is to say, his art truly — and stunningly — came into its own after Seurat’s death. In an evolution of his previous practice, Signac’s brushstrokes grew slightly larger and looser, now resembling irregular blocks more than methodical dots. The result was a subtle move away from naturalism in the direction of abstraction — and a heightening of the effect of his colours, whose decorative qualities he increasingly privileged over descriptive ones.

In the words of the art critic Edmond Cousturier, Signac’s paintings became ‘graced with the most lavish harmonies to enchant the eye’.

Signac’s ports — and his influence on the Fauves

Perhaps unsurprisingly given his love of sailing, the painter frequently depicted rivers, seas, boats and ships. The most expensive work by Signac ever sold at auction is Concarneau, calme du matin (Opus no. 219, larghetto) — which captures a flotilla of sardine boats leaving the Breton harbour town of Concarneau on a summer’s morning. It fetched $39,320,000 as part of the 2022 sale Visionary: The Paul G. Allen Collection.

Signac also produced a cycle of paintings inspired by Claude Joseph Vernet’s series ‘Vues des ports de France’, from the mid-18th century, depicting multiple waterfront towns on the French coast. He cast his eye farther afield, however, producing views not just of La Rochelle, Saint-Tropez and Marseilles, but also Venice, Rotterdam and Constantinople — each port captured with infectious enthusiasm.

Signac found time, too, to write an influential book: D’Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionnisme. Published in 1899, this set out a manifesto for the Neo-Impressionist movement, explaining it as a stage in the natural evolution of French painting from Delacroix (born at the end of the 18th century) onwards.

Three of its keenest readers were Maurice de Vlaminck, Henri Matisse and André Derain, all of whom went to stay with Signac in Saint-Tropez in the summer of 1904. Absorbing his lessons about the application of pure colour, the trio would soon launch the Fauvist movement. Matisse actually began his proto-Fauve masterpiece Luxe, calme et volupté at La Hune. Signac was its first owner.

Across his life, Signac collected a number of artworks — by Impressionists, Neo-Impressionists and Fauves alike — keeping abreast of avant-garde trends in his role as president of the Société des Artistes Indépendants (which he held for 25 years from 1908).

Signac’s watercolours

No look at Signac’s career is complete without considering his watercolours. He produced these pretty much throughout his life. At first, he saw them as preparatory sketches (made in situ) of scenes he would paint in oils back in his studio.

Before long, however, he began to create watercolours as artworks in their own right. They communicate a sense of immediacy, freedom and spontaneity. As a sign of how seriously Signac came to take the medium, it’s worth noting that he showed 100 watercolours (and just a dozen oil paintings) at his debut solo exhibition, at Paris’s Maison de l’Art Nouveau in 1902.

The artist was made a commander of the Legion of Honour by the French state in 1933. He died in Paris two years later, aged 71, shortly after completing a final sailing trip — to and from Corsica.

Signac had often used musical analogies when discussing Neo-Impressionism. He compared painters to composers, for example, and a touch of colour on a canvas to ‘a note in a symphony’. One might add that he produced some of the most dulcet works in the history of modern art.

Art Moderne and Art Contemporain take place on 24 October, with viewing on 23 and 24 October at Christie’s in Paris

Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists is at the National Gallery in London until 8 February 2026

Related artists: Paul Signac