In early 1906, as Paul Signac (1863-1935) was completing his large painting of the church of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde and the port of Marseilles, he was visited by the former Nabi Maurice Denis, and Ker-Xavier Roussel, who had a house nearby. After that, Signac visited Spain briefly, then went to Paris for the annual Salon des Indépendants, where that painting was exhibited alongside six other landscapes of his.

In the Spring, he travelled to the Netherlands, where he visited Rotterdam and Amsterdam for the second time, and painted watercolour sketches. During the summer he cruised the Mediterranean on board a friend’s yacht. For much of the rest of the year, he was busy turning his sketches into finished oil paintings.

Signac’s finished painting of Steamboats, Rotterdam (1906) is remarkable in retaining the sense of activity, motion and constant change in a technique notorious for its painstaking slowness. At the time this was compared with Monet’s series of the River Thames in London, and refers back to Signac’s early fascination in the industrial uses of rivers.

While it still contains one steamboat in recognition of the modern, this view of the Canal of Overschie (1906) is altogether more tranquil. Overschie has since been absorbed into the Rotterdam conurbation. As a village, it had been a centre for barges, as it’s at the confluence of the four different Schie rivers. The church spire at the right might appear oddly eastern with its bulges, but shows accurately the unusual profile of the village church.

Rotterdam. The Windmill. The Canal. Morning (1906) is a similar view of a windmill in the centre of the city.

Signac probably painted The Bay (1906) when he was back in Saint-Tropez. This demonstrates his use of high chroma reds with blue-greens as complementary colours.

He’s thought to have painted this more static view of The Port of Rotterdam in early 1907. Unlike his previous painting of Marseilles, the tiles of colour don’t grow smaller or fuse together in the distance, and its depth is largely achieved by progressive desaturation, to make the distance fade into the mist, dissolving as in his paintings of Venice.

The detail below shows how tiles are abbreviated to form vertical lines such as flagpoles, and their density.

In early 1907, thirty-four of Signac’s oil paintings and many sketches and watercolours were exhibited at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery. This was acclaimed as a great success, and he went on to exhibit further at the annual Salon des Indépendants. Soon after the latter had opened, in late March, Signac travelled with the painter Henri Person (1876-1926) to Constantinople (modern Istanbul), where they painted for six weeks before returning to France.

This is the only accessible finished painting from Signac’s visit to what’s known in French as La Corne d’Or, or The Golden Horn, (1907). Using the same compositional technique that had proved so successful in his views of Venice, this shows the Süleymaniye Mosque on the Third Hill from the north-west, on the western (European) side of the Bosphorus Strait.

In the foreground are brightly coloured rowing boats taking part in what looks like a regatta, and a row of sailing ships on moorings, all in the waters of the Golden Horn. The mosque is relatively desaturated as it dissolves into the distant pink and gold sky. This mosque was built between 1550-57 for Suleiman the Magnificent, and encloses the mausoleums of the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire and his wife. It’s one of the best-known sights in the city of Istanbul, and an ideal view for Signac’s treatment.

References

Cachin F (2000) Signac. Catalogue raisoné de l’Oeuvre Peint, Gallimard. ISBN 2 07 011597 6.
Ferretti-Bocquillon M et al (2001) Signac 1863-1935, Yale UP. ISBN 0 300 08860 4.
Ferretti-Bocquillon M et al. (2013) Signac, les Couleurs de l’Eau, Gallimard. ISBN 978 2 07 014106 7.