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Lot Essay
In a letter to Charles Angrand dated 6 February 1897, Paul Signac announced that he was leaving Paris the following week to visit Mont Saint-Michel, the old monastery built on a small island lying offshore in the tidal flats east of Saint-Malo. "I should like to spend a couple of weeks roaming around the silhouette to see what one can get out of it" (quoted in M. Ferretti-Bocquillon et al, Signac 1863-1935, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2001, p. 173). In the same letter the artist mentioned that he was planning to visit London in April or May to see the paintings by Joseph Mallord William Turner there. While the English trip did not materialize, the example of Turner, whose work Signac had long admired, was to play a significant role in the series of paintings that Signac executed of Mont Saint-Michel later in the year.
Françoise Cachin (op. cit.) records five paintings on canvas and two small studies on panel of the monastery seen at different times of day and in varying atmospheric conditions. Signac was aware of the difficulty that he faced in depicting this subject; he had to take the simple pyramidal shape of the monastery, silhouetted against the vast emptiness of sky and the tidal flats, and turn it into a visually interesting motif. Signac achieved this by using subtle coloristic effects to record five phases during the course of the day: morning fog and mist, fog with faintly filtered sunlight (the present work), the full late morning sun, cloudy skies, and sunset. The form of the monastery slowly materializes in the gathering sunlight, partially dissolves in the silvery light of overcast, and reasserts itself against the dramatic final light of day. In this series Signac pays homage to Turner's landscapes, in which the English master veiled the corporeality of things in an almost palpable haze of light and weather.
A second influence plays a significant role here as well: the artist's appreciation of the novel compositional devices in Japanese woodblock prints. Signac had used the flattened space and twisting arabesque of the Japanese print to excellent effect in the series of paintings immediately preceding the Mont Saint-Michel group, which feature the tall pines around Saint-Tropez. Japanese landscape prints often feature a single dominant motif situated off-center in the composition; this served as a precedent for the placement of the silhouetted shape of the monastery in a flat and largely vacant space. Signac enlivens the foreground of his composition by introducing arabesques in the form of the causeway markers and the twisting outlines of tidal channels.
The serial nature of the Mont Saint-Michel pictures recalls the sequential works of Monet. However, while Monet usually worked sur le motif and at least began his paintings outdoors, the more systematic and scientific nature of divisionist painting, derived from the color theories of Charles Blanc, Eugène Chevreul, Ogden Rood and Charles Henry, made working directly from nature impractical, except when making loosely rendered studies. In 1894 Signac developed an effective working method. He no longer painted the final version of his subjects en plein air; instead, he would do watercolors, wash studies and oil sketches in front of his subjects, to which he would then refer while working on full size oil compositions in the studio.
Signac worked on the Mont Saint-Michel canvases in his Saint-Tropez studio. In a letter dated 22 July 1897, Signac commented that his Mont Saint-Michel pictures were progressing well; however, those that were painted in a gray tonality, requiring a mixture of blue and orange pigments, were presenting some difficulty. Signac's practice of divisionism was moving away from the strict application of the pointillist technique he had learned from Seurat: "here the aim of the divided brushstroke is to depict the vibration of light rather than to obey the law of simultaneous contrast, with which Signac henceforth took ever-increasing liberties" (F. Cachin, Paul Signac, Greenwich, Connecticut, 1971, p. 68).
Signac completed the Mont Saint-Michel series during the winter of 1897-1898. He wrote in his journal on 1 January 1898 that he was putting the final touches on them during the day, and at night he was returning to another important project, his series of articles that were published later that year as D'Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionnisme. The present painting is one of two from the Mont Saint-Michel series that were included in Signac's exhibition at Durand-Ruel in March 1899 and received enthusiastic reviews.
Françoise Cachin (op. cit.) records five paintings on canvas and two small studies on panel of the monastery seen at different times of day and in varying atmospheric conditions. Signac was aware of the difficulty that he faced in depicting this subject; he had to take the simple pyramidal shape of the monastery, silhouetted against the vast emptiness of sky and the tidal flats, and turn it into a visually interesting motif. Signac achieved this by using subtle coloristic effects to record five phases during the course of the day: morning fog and mist, fog with faintly filtered sunlight (the present work), the full late morning sun, cloudy skies, and sunset. The form of the monastery slowly materializes in the gathering sunlight, partially dissolves in the silvery light of overcast, and reasserts itself against the dramatic final light of day. In this series Signac pays homage to Turner's landscapes, in which the English master veiled the corporeality of things in an almost palpable haze of light and weather.
A second influence plays a significant role here as well: the artist's appreciation of the novel compositional devices in Japanese woodblock prints. Signac had used the flattened space and twisting arabesque of the Japanese print to excellent effect in the series of paintings immediately preceding the Mont Saint-Michel group, which feature the tall pines around Saint-Tropez. Japanese landscape prints often feature a single dominant motif situated off-center in the composition; this served as a precedent for the placement of the silhouetted shape of the monastery in a flat and largely vacant space. Signac enlivens the foreground of his composition by introducing arabesques in the form of the causeway markers and the twisting outlines of tidal channels.
The serial nature of the Mont Saint-Michel pictures recalls the sequential works of Monet. However, while Monet usually worked sur le motif and at least began his paintings outdoors, the more systematic and scientific nature of divisionist painting, derived from the color theories of Charles Blanc, Eugène Chevreul, Ogden Rood and Charles Henry, made working directly from nature impractical, except when making loosely rendered studies. In 1894 Signac developed an effective working method. He no longer painted the final version of his subjects en plein air; instead, he would do watercolors, wash studies and oil sketches in front of his subjects, to which he would then refer while working on full size oil compositions in the studio.
Signac worked on the Mont Saint-Michel canvases in his Saint-Tropez studio. In a letter dated 22 July 1897, Signac commented that his Mont Saint-Michel pictures were progressing well; however, those that were painted in a gray tonality, requiring a mixture of blue and orange pigments, were presenting some difficulty. Signac's practice of divisionism was moving away from the strict application of the pointillist technique he had learned from Seurat: "here the aim of the divided brushstroke is to depict the vibration of light rather than to obey the law of simultaneous contrast, with which Signac henceforth took ever-increasing liberties" (F. Cachin, Paul Signac, Greenwich, Connecticut, 1971, p. 68).
Signac completed the Mont Saint-Michel series during the winter of 1897-1898. He wrote in his journal on 1 January 1898 that he was putting the final touches on them during the day, and at night he was returning to another important project, his series of articles that were published later that year as D'Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionnisme. The present painting is one of two from the Mont Saint-Michel series that were included in Signac's exhibition at Durand-Ruel in March 1899 and received enthusiastic reviews.