Barfleur, le port

Barfleur is a small fishing harbour on the Normandy coast, and Signac painted this view of its port in 1930 — late in a career during which he had been applying the systematic divisionist method for over four decades. His late harbour and port subjects return to the maritime themes that had preoccupied him since the 1880s, when he was developing Pointillism alongside Seurat. By 1930 the movements he helped define were fully canonised, and his continued practice of divisionism in his seventies represented both artistic consistency and a form of historical witness.

Signac applies his late divisionist method with the regularity and stroke scale developed since Seurat's death. Individual touches of colour are larger and more visible than his early 1880s work, creating an almost mosaic-like surface.