The Red Buoy

The Red Buoy, painted at Saint-Tropez in 1895, is one of Signac's most celebrated canvases and one of the purest demonstrations of divisionist color theory in the natural world. The single red buoy floating in the harbor — incandescent against the blues and greens of the Mediterranean water — provided the ideal test case for the complementary contrast principle: red and green are complementaries on the color wheel, and the maximum intensity of both occurs when they are juxtaposed. Signac likely chose the subject precisely because it offered this chromatic challenge. The painting is now in the Musée d'Orsay.

The red buoy is surrounded by a halo of lighter, slightly orange-red dots that grade into the cool blue-green of the harbor water, maximizing the complementary contrast. The water itself is built from a complex mosaic of blues, greens, and violets, with reflected warm tones of the boats and buildings above.