Spring in Provence

Spring in Provence (1903) shows Signac painting the inland landscape of southern France with the same chromatic ambition he brought to his Mediterranean harbour subjects. The Provence interior — lavender fields, olive groves, ochre soil, cypress trees — offered a richly varied warm palette that responded ideally to his mosaic divisionist technique. By 1903 Signac had settled into his house at Saint-Tropez and was using the surrounding landscape as freely as the harbour. Now at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

The Provençal palette dominates: warm ochres, yellows, and olive-greens contrasted with the vivid blue of the sky and distant hills. Signac's mosaic patches are large and confident, building the landscape's varied surfaces — earth, foliage, stone — in freely juxtaposed warm and cool colour fields.