Detail of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde (La Bonne-Mère), Marseilles by Signac in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, August 2010

Artist: Paul Signac (French, Paris 1863–1935 Paris)

Title: Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde (La Bonne-Mère), Marseilles

Date: 1905–6

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 35 x 45 3/4 in. (88.9 x
116.2 cm)

Classification: Paintings

Credit Line: Gift of Robert Lehman, 1955

Accession Number: 55.220.1


Gallery Label:

Signac went even farther than Seurat in his methodical studies of the division of light into its components of pure color, and he arranged rectangular brushstrokes like tesserae in a mosaic.

In 1901 Signac had painted a smaller and less vibrant version of this view of the Marseilles, crowned by the church of Notre Dame de la Garde. The luminosity and brilliant color of the present picture are dependent on his continued use of unmixed pigments, but also on his contact with the young Fauve painters Henri-Edmond Cross and Matisse and Saint-Tropez in summer 1904.

Text from: www.metmuseum.org/Works_of_Art/collection_database/europe...