Paul Signac Artist
Paul Signac 1863-1935 was a French Neo-Impressionist painter who, with Georges Seurat, helped develop the artistic technique Pointillism. He began to travel in 1892, sailing a small boat to almost all the ports of France, to the Netherlands, and on the Mediterranean Sea as far as Constantinople, basing his boat at St. Tropez. From his various ports of call, Signac brought back vibrant, colourful watercolours, sketched rapidly from nature. From these sketches, he painted large studio canvases that are carefully composed of small, mosaic-like squares of colour quite different from the tiny, variegated dots introduced and used by Seurat.