Setting Sun, Sardine Fishing, Concarneau

Setting Sun at Concarneau — with its subtitle referencing sardine fishing and the opus number (Opus 221) that Signac assigned to major works in imitation of musical composition — represents his mature divisionist practice applied to the distinctive atmospheric effects of the Atlantic sunset. He began numbering his works by opus around 1887, a practice that underscored the systematic, quasi-scientific character of his divisionist project: each canvas was a constructed exercise in chromatic harmony, not merely an observed scene. The sardine fleet at Concarneau provided him with the industrial maritime subject he preferred for his most ambitious compositions.

The setting sun drives the composition's entire color logic: warm oranges and yellows at the horizon modulate through red and violet into the cooler blue-purple of the zenith, with these hues reflected and complicated in the water surface below. Signac's dots in the water are typically larger and more elongated than those in the sky.