The Port of St. Tropez

Saint-Tropez was Signac's home from 1892, when he purchased a boat and established himself there, and the port became his most recurring pictorial motif across the following decades. This 1914 canvas in the Brooklyn Museum captures the harbour in the years immediately before the First World War. Saint-Tropez was then still a quiet fishing and yachting village rather than the glamorous resort it would become later in the century — Signac's sustained attention was itself part of the artistic interest that gradually transformed the location's identity.

Signac's mature divisionist method is applied with great confidence. Water reflects sky and surrounding forms in a mosaic of warm and cool complementaries. Massed masts create vertical rhythms against the horizontal surface, a device repeated consistently in his Saint-Tropez port paintings.