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Lot Essay
Franoise Cachin has kindly confirmed that this painting will be included in her forthcoming Signac catalogue raisonn.
Le clocher de Saint-Tropez belongs to a series painted in the summer of 1896 when Signac abandoned his scientific approach to the divisionist stroke and adopted a reduced palette that aimed for harmony and luminosity. In his own journal he wrote, "I attach more and more importance to purity of brushstrokes and try to give it the greatest possible purity and intensity. It is this love of true colour that makes us paint in this way, and not the dot".
On the advice of his friend and fellow painter, Henri Edmond Cross, Signac sailed with his wife on their yacht, Olympia, from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean to 'discover' the little town of Saint-Tropez. The artist was a great admirer of Guy de Maupassant and his desire to seek out the port may have been influenced by the following description, which had recently appeared in the novelist's work Sur l'Eau: "This wild, sombre and superb region still called the country of the Moors... Saint-Topepz is the capital of this little Saracen kingdom, almost all of whose villages, built at the top of steep hillsides that protect them from attack, are still full of Moorish houses... This isolated little port is one of the charming and simple daughters of the sea, one of those modest little towns, jutting into the water like a shell, nourished by fish and sea air and producer of sailors."
Signac worked throughout the summers producing a number of impressive and highly successful oils, including La boue rouge (fig. 1), works of the period, including the present painting, were sent to Paris for exhibition at the Salon des Indpendants each year. Le Clocher de Saint-Tropez was shown in the Salon of 1898. He also executed a watercolour sketch of this oil painting, housed in an American private collection (see exh. cat. Signac et Saint-Tropez, Muse de L'Annonciade, Saint-Tropez, June-October 1992, p. 96) a drawing housed in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and a colour lithograph dated from 1897-98.
Le clocher de Saint-Tropez belongs to a series painted in the summer of 1896 when Signac abandoned his scientific approach to the divisionist stroke and adopted a reduced palette that aimed for harmony and luminosity. In his own journal he wrote, "I attach more and more importance to purity of brushstrokes and try to give it the greatest possible purity and intensity. It is this love of true colour that makes us paint in this way, and not the dot".
On the advice of his friend and fellow painter, Henri Edmond Cross, Signac sailed with his wife on their yacht, Olympia, from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean to 'discover' the little town of Saint-Tropez. The artist was a great admirer of Guy de Maupassant and his desire to seek out the port may have been influenced by the following description, which had recently appeared in the novelist's work Sur l'Eau: "This wild, sombre and superb region still called the country of the Moors... Saint-Topepz is the capital of this little Saracen kingdom, almost all of whose villages, built at the top of steep hillsides that protect them from attack, are still full of Moorish houses... This isolated little port is one of the charming and simple daughters of the sea, one of those modest little towns, jutting into the water like a shell, nourished by fish and sea air and producer of sailors."
Signac worked throughout the summers producing a number of impressive and highly successful oils, including La boue rouge (fig. 1), works of the period, including the present painting, were sent to Paris for exhibition at the Salon des Indpendants each year. Le Clocher de Saint-Tropez was shown in the Salon of 1898. He also executed a watercolour sketch of this oil painting, housed in an American private collection (see exh. cat. Signac et Saint-Tropez, Muse de L'Annonciade, Saint-Tropez, June-October 1992, p. 96) a drawing housed in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and a colour lithograph dated from 1897-98.