Comblat-le-Château. La Vallée

Comblat-le-Château, La Vallée (1887) was painted during Signac's summer in the Cantal region of the Auvergne, where he visited the small village of Comblat-le-Château on the Truyère river. This excursion into the volcanic landscape of central France was an unusual departure from his coastal subjects. The valley's enclosing hills, river, and medieval château gave him a different range of chromatic and compositional problems from his more typical maritime or Parisian scenes.

The Cantal valley landscape is rendered in early mature divisionist dots appropriate to the 1887 period, with the greens and ochres of upland French countryside replacing the more vivid Mediterranean palette. The enclosed valley composition — hills framing a river below — is more three-dimensionally complex than his typical horizontal coastal arrangements.