La Seine à Courbevoie

Courbevoie, a suburb northwest of Paris on the Seine, was a key site of early neo-Impressionism — Seurat's Grande Jatte island and Asnières bank are visible from the Courbevoie shore, and both Seurat and Signac worked there in the critical years 1884-1886. This Seine at Courbevoie view thus belongs to the founding moment of divisionism, when Signac and Seurat were developing their theory in direct response to the industrial-suburban landscape of the Seine's western reaches — not the picturesque rural Seine of the Impressionists but the factory-flanked, boat-trafficked river of the working suburbs.

The canvas applies Signac's early, relatively small divisionist dots in the systematic method he developed from his reading of Chevreul and Rood. The industrial element — factory chimneys, loading quays — is treated with the same methodical color analysis as the natural water and sky, refusing any picturesque hierarchy between 'interesting' and 'uninteresting' subjects.