Cherbourg – The Artists – Signac, Paul
This page forms part of a series of pages dedicated to the many artists who painted in Cherbourg. A full list of all the artists with a link to their works can be found at the bottom of this page.
Paul Signac (1863 – 1935) was a French Post-Impressionist painter. He followed a course of training in architecture before, at the age of 18, deciding to pursue a career as a painter, after attending an exhibit of Monet‘s work. He sailed on the Mediterranean Sea, visiting the coasts of Europe and painting the landscapes he encountered. In later years, he also painted a series of watercolors of French harbor cities.
In 1884 he met Claude Monet and Georges Seurat. He was struck by the systematic working methods of Seurat and by his theory of colors and he became Seurat’s faithful supporter, friend, and heir with his description of Neo-Impressionism and Divisionism method. Under Seurat’s influence he abandoned the short brushstrokes of Impressionism to experiment with scientifically-juxtaposed small dots of pure color, intended to combine and blend not on the canvas, but in the viewer’s eye, the defining feature of Pointillism.
In 1886 Signac met Vincent van Gogh in Paris. During 1887 the two artists regularly went to Asnières-sur-Seine together, where they painted such subjects as river landscapes and cafés. Initially, van Gogh chiefly admired Signac’s loose painting technique. In March 1889, Signac visited van Gogh at Arles. The next year he made a short trip to Italy, seeing Genoa, Florence, and Naples.
Signac loved sailing and began to travel in 1892, sailing a small boat to almost all the ports of France, to the Netherlands, and on the Mediterranean Sea as far as Constantinople, basing his boat at St. Tropez, which he later would make popular to other artists. From his various ports of call, Signac brought back vibrant, colorful watercolors, sketched rapidly from nature. From these sketches, he painted large studio canvases that are carefully composed of small, mosaic-like squares of color quite different from the tiny, variegated dots introduced and used by Seurat.
On 7 November 1892, Signac married Berthe Robles at the town hall of the 18th arrondissement of Paris. The witnesses at the wedding were Alexandre Lemonier, Maximilien Luce, Camille Pissarro, and Georges Lecomte.
Signac wrote several important works on the theory of art, among them, From Eugene Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism, published in 1899. It is a monograph devoted to Johan Barthold Jongkind (1819–1891), and was published in 1927. He also authored several introductions to the catalogues of art exhibitions and many other writings yet to be published.
Politically, he was an anarchist, as were many of his friends, including Felix Feneon and Camille Pissarro.
Click here to read more about Paul Signac on Wikipedia.
NOTE: Click on any image below for a bigger version (no new window will open).
NOTE: A blackbox like this one, means that there is an explanation text about today’s situation of the painting above it.
NOTE: Click on this photo icon 
anywhere below a painting to see a photo of what the area looks like today.
TODAY: The Cherbourg harbour remains quite intact, but the commercial boats have been mostly replaced by pleasure boats.
TODAY: The Fort du Roule, on top of the Roule mountain, still exists today. Building had started in 1793, and was used extensively by the Germans during WWII. The site can be visited.
Signac painted several other places in Normandy, which will be featured eventually on this site. A link “⇠” to those cities will appear below.
Here are the artists we found who made paintings of Cherbourg.
- 🇬🇧 Bonington, Richard Parkes
- 🇫🇷 Boudin, Eugene-Louis
- 🇫🇷 Bourgeois, Constant
- 🇬🇧 Bruce, Mary Louisa, Countess of Elgin and Kincardine
- 🇬🇧 Cotman, John Sell
- 🇫🇷 Crepin, Louis-Philippe
- 🇫🇷 Friesz, Othon
- 🇫🇷 Garneray, Ambroise Louis
- 🇷🇺 Gritsenko, Nikolai
- 🇫🇷 Gudin, Theodore
- 🇫🇷 Le Gray, Gustave
- 🇬🇧 Leitch, Richard Principal
- 🇫🇷 Mathon, Emile-Louis
- 🇫🇷 Mozin, Charles Louis
- 🇫🇷 Noel, Jules Achille
- 🇫🇷 Signac, Paul
- 🇧🇪 Timmermans, Louis-Etienne
Click here to see the map of where all the painters applied their art and read more about it.
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