The Pont-Neuf, Paris

The Pont-Neuf, Paris (1931) is one of Signac's last major Parisian paintings, depicting the oldest standing bridge in Paris — the Pont-Neuf across the Seine — in the late phase of his career. By 1931 he was in his mid-sixties, still active as a painter and president of the Indépendants, returning to the Seine bridges that had been part of his subject vocabulary since the 1880s. This late work captures a lifetime's familiarity with the Paris riverscape. Hiroshima Museum of Art.

Signac's fully liberated late style applies large colour patches with expressive freedom, the bridge and river rendered in vivid blues, ochres, and reds without careful systematic gradation. The mosaic surface is gestural and confident, reflecting decades of accumulated mastery of divisionist colour relationships.