In the previous episodes in this series looking at the paintings of Paul Signac (1863-1935), I have shown most of his accessible oil paintings, from the start of his career to shortly before his death. Before I move on to look at a selection of his watercolours, I pause here to consider how his pointillist technique had changed over that period of nearly fifty years.

In his earliest pointillist paintings, he appears to have applied larger areas of even colour, allowed them to dry, then applied small patches of what are usually contrasting colours. These are most clearly visible in the foreground, on the tiller and the decking of the barge. These small patches aren’t generally organised, but are applied fairly evenly over much of the painting. Neither do they change size according to how deep they are into the view.

A couple of years later, his technique has changed little, although the patches applied on more even surfaces, such as the water, are noticeably larger than those on the boats in the foreground.

Five years on, and this detail of his portrait of a Woman with a Parasol shows the patches organising over the surfaces of the model’s face and neck. He also uses the principle of simultaneous contrast: the dominant colours used in the handle of the parasol change from orange to green and back again according to the surrounding colour.

Another five years later, in 1898, this detail of La Terrasse shows his use of a fine black outline to pick out the figure and her arm. Although slightly larger than his regular landscapes, its swirling patches of colour are relatively coarse.

This detail of The Demolisher from the same period has greater contrast in the colour of its patches, and more obvious organisation of their placement according to the topography of each surface.

Shown in this detail of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde, Marseilles from 1905-06 is the elongation of his patches into rectangular tiles or tesserae of paint. These are visibly coarser-grained in the foreground, finer and almost merging in the distance and sky.

By 1907, these tesserae were an established feature, replacing his more variable blobs. Each is arranged according to the form of the object, and some are relatively thick if not impasto.

Carefully oriented tesserae continued for the rest of his career, here in this detail from The Port of La Rochelle, from 1915.

A decade later there is little change in his construction or technique, and many of the tesserae are formed using impasto. This is a far cry from his early paintings of the late 1880s.