Antibes. Morning

The renowned French landscape painter Paul Signac was, alongside George Seurat, at the forefront of the Neo-Impressionist movement in painting. The painting Antibes – Morning, whose title comes from the artist’s handwritten catalogue of his works, shows three sailing ships docked in the port and a lighthouse against a rocky shore.

Signac settled in Antibes on the French Riviera in the autumn of 1913. One year later, he produced two views of the town at different times of day – morning and evening. The former painting belongs to the National Museum in Warsaw while the latter resides in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Strasbourg.

The artist sailed all along the Mediterranean coast, visiting places like Marseille, Venice and Istanbul. The many scenes of the Antibes port, which he painted in 1913–1935, were usually framed looking landward from out at sea and offered a picturesque view of the walls of the lighthouse against the distant hills as well as the medieval Château Grimaldi on the hilltop and the houses in the old part of the town. Signac was fascinated by how changes in the sunlight affected the appearance of the local nature, whose rich colours he strove to capture through the technique of pointillism, a method involving the use of short parallel brush strokes to fill the canvas with minute dabs of colour.