Fort du Roule, Cherbourg

Painted in 1932 and now at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, this late work depicting the fortress at Cherbourg on the Normandy coast shows Signac still fully committed to his divisionist method in his late sixties. Fort du Roule occupies the cliffs above the deep-water harbour that made Cherbourg strategically vital; Signac had visited numerous Norman ports over his decades of watercolour sketching. The work demonstrates that his colour theory remained vigorous to the end of his life, even as the wider art world had long moved through Fauvism, Cubism, and Surrealism. He died the following year, 1935.

The late style shows larger, more confident strokes than the careful pointillist dots of the 1880s. Cool grey-blue tones dominate the northern coastal atmosphere, relieved by warm ochres in the fortified cliff face. The harbour water below is rendered in horizontal bands of green, teal, and violet.