Étude pour La Place des Lices

The Place des Lices in Saint-Tropez — a broad, plane-tree-shaded square used for pétanque — became one of Signac's most beloved subjects during his long residence in the town. He painted both preparatory studies and finished versions of the square across the 1890s, and the multiple studies for this motif reveal his working method: building from loose preparatory sketches in oil or watercolor toward the systematic divisionist application of the finished canvas. The square's social life — local players, visiting tourists, the rhythms of provincial afternoon — provided the kind of contemporary leisure subject that continued the Impressionist tradition even within Signac's more theoretical framework.

The study applies divisionist strokes with less systematic regularity than the finished canvases, allowing the underlying color reasoning to be more legible. The dappled light through the plane-tree canopy — alternating warm sunlit patches and cool shade — is an ideal subject for divisionist optical mixture.