Paris, The Bridge of Arts II

Paris, The Bridge of Arts II (1928) is a late work in which Signac returned to one of his longstanding Parisian bridge subjects. Now in his early sixties, he painted the city's celebrated nineteenth-century iron footbridge with the freely mosaic style of his final decades. The Pont des Arts and its view of the Institut de France and the Seine had been a recurrent motif throughout his career, making this a reflection on the Seine as enduring subject. Musée Carnavalet, Paris.

The late style is fully in evidence: large, gestural mosaic patches in vivid contrasting hues applied with an almost expressionistic freedom. The bridge's iron grid provides geometric structure while Signac's broad colour patches dissolve its material heaviness into chromatic vibration. Water reflections extend the colour field downward.