The bell tower of Saint-Tropez

The Bell Tower of Saint-Tropez (1896) is one of Signac's many paintings of his adopted home town viewed from its harbour or surrounding streets. The town's distinctive seventeenth-century bell tower of the church of Saint-Tropez rises above the low harbour buildings and provides a vertical landmark in an otherwise horizontal townscape. By 1896 Signac had spent four summers at Saint-Tropez and knew its topography and light conditions intimately. Fondation Bemberg, Toulouse.

The bell tower's warm ochre stone is rendered in mosaic dots of ochre, gold, and pale rose, contrasting with the deep blue-green of the Mediterranean sea and sky beyond. The vertical tower creates the compositional counterpoint to the horizontal harbour that Signac often sought in his Saint-Tropez townscape paintings.