The Seine at Les Andelys

The Seine at Les Andelys (1886) is among Signac's earliest mature works made after he had fully adopted Seurat's divisionist method. Les Andelys, a picturesque town on the Seine in Normandy below Château Gaillard, offered a different type of river scene from the industrial suburbs around Paris. Working there in 1886, the same year as Seurat's Grande Jatte exhibition, allowed Signac to test divisionism against a scenic landscape motif. Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena.

The Seine's calm reflective surface and wooded banks are rendered in regular dots that carefully separate warm land-tones from cool water-tones. The river's horizontal plane provides maximum surface for demonstrating optical colour mixing, Signac's primary technical concern in this early period.