Women by the Well

Women by the Well is among Signac's most directly figure-based compositions, connecting his divisionist technique to the social subject tradition running from Millet's agricultural workers through Seurat's Bathers at Asnières. The rural women at a village well provided a subject with roots in both ancient pastoral imagery and contemporary genre painting, and Signac's multiple versions (designated I, II, and III) show him working through the compositional problem of adapting his systematic color method to the human figure. The subject is unusual in his output: he was primarily a landscape and marine painter, and the figure compositions represent deliberate expansions of divisionist method into areas where Seurat had worked most ambitiously.

The human figures are built from divisionist dots applied with the same systematic method as his landscape elements — the skin tones analyzed into their component warm and cool parts, the drapery constructed from the full range of the garment's color in light and shadow. The well and surrounding landscape frame the figures without dominating them.