In the Time of Harmony: The Golden Age is Not in the Past, it is in the Future

The large finished canvas of In the Time of Harmony (Musée de Montreuil, 1893-1895) represents the culmination of Signac's anarchist utopian vision and his most ambitious figural composition. The full title — 'In the Age of Harmony: The Golden Age is Not in the Past, it is in the Future' — announces its political program explicitly. The canvas depicts a Mediterranean coastal scene of liberated human beings at leisure: a couple reading, a man playing with a child, figures swimming and tending a garden. Every element is chosen to depict abundance, freedom, and harmony with nature, realized through the same divisionist method Signac used for his harbor views — arguing implicitly that scientific color and anarchist society were both expressions of the same natural order.

At three meters wide, the canvas required Signac to adapt his divisionist dots to a monumental scale — the marks are larger than his smaller cabinet works but maintain the same systematic color interval logic. The warm Mediterranean palette radiates the optimism of the subject, with the sea and sky in harmonious blues and the figures bathed in warm golden light.