拍品專文
Françoise Cachin will include this painting in her forthcoming Signac catalogue raisonné.
Paul Signac first came to St. Tropez in 1892. Signac and his wife sailed on the yacht Olympia to discover what de Maupassant in Sur L'Eau had called the "little Saracen kingdom...still full of Moorish houses...one of those modest little towns, jutting into the water like a shell." Signac often depicted yachts in the works of this period, and the sails of the boats in the present picture resemble those of the Olympia.
By 1895, Signac had changed his technique considerably. He turned away from a precise pointillism, his brushstroke gradually becoming larger and less systematic, his color richer and more harmonious. He found that the intense light of St. Tropez made everything around him appear white and luminous, and he thus abandoned his strictly analytical approach to color. He had also stopped painting outdoors by this time and, at Pissarro's suggestion, had begun to make watercolor sketchbook notes en plein air to be used later for his studio pictures. The sketch for this oil painting is in an American private collection (see exh. cat., Signac and St. Tropez, Musée de L'Annonciade, St. Tropez, June-Oct., 1992, p. 96). The watercolor shows the harbor and the buildings; the boats were added in the production of this painting in the studio. There is also a drawing of the subject in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and a lithograph.
Signac wrote to Felix Fénéon in 1894, "I much prefer to go to nature as to a library, to take from it what I need and carefully to leave aside the mass of things that are useless or harmful..." 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 color that makes us paint in this way, and not the dot" (quoted in H. de Toulouse-Lautrec, Arts de France, 1947).
Paul Signac first came to St. Tropez in 1892. Signac and his wife sailed on the yacht Olympia to discover what de Maupassant in Sur L'Eau had called the "little Saracen kingdom...still full of Moorish houses...one of those modest little towns, jutting into the water like a shell." Signac often depicted yachts in the works of this period, and the sails of the boats in the present picture resemble those of the Olympia.
By 1895, Signac had changed his technique considerably. He turned away from a precise pointillism, his brushstroke gradually becoming larger and less systematic, his color richer and more harmonious. He found that the intense light of St. Tropez made everything around him appear white and luminous, and he thus abandoned his strictly analytical approach to color. He had also stopped painting outdoors by this time and, at Pissarro's suggestion, had begun to make watercolor sketchbook notes en plein air to be used later for his studio pictures. The sketch for this oil painting is in an American private collection (see exh. cat., Signac and St. Tropez, Musée de L'Annonciade, St. Tropez, June-Oct., 1992, p. 96). The watercolor shows the harbor and the buildings; the boats were added in the production of this painting in the studio. There is also a drawing of the subject in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and a lithograph.
Signac wrote to Felix Fénéon in 1894, "I much prefer to go to nature as to a library, to take from it what I need and carefully to leave aside the mass of things that are useless or harmful..." 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 color that makes us paint in this way, and not the dot" (quoted in H. de Toulouse-Lautrec, Arts de France, 1947).