Lighthouse at Gatteville

The lighthouse at Gatteville, at the northern tip of the Cotentin peninsula in Normandy, is one of the tallest lighthouses in France, and Signac's painting of it belongs to his campaign along the Norman coast in the 1920s. By this period, his technique had evolved significantly from the strictly systematic pointillism of his theoretical years — the marks are larger, the application more confident and less mechanically regular, but the underlying color analysis remains consistent with his neo-Impressionist principles. The lighthouse subject, with its clean geometric form against open sky and sea, was a reliable compositional type he returned to throughout his career.

The lighthouse tower rises through the center of the composition, its pale stone rendered in warm greys and creams against the cooler blue-grey of the Norman sky. Signac's late divisionist marks — broad, square-ish dabs rather than tiny systematic dots — build the color relationships efficiently without the painstaking point-by-point application of his early method.