Paul Signac - Port-en-Bessin (1883)

 

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Paul Signac painted this beach scene much like his inspiration, Claude Monet, directly in the open air, facing the motif. He captured rocks and sea with rhythmic, long brushstrokes. In the following years, Signac, along with his fellow painter Georges Seurat, developed a fundamentally new painting technique, known as Pointillism. They placed individual color dots next to each other, intended to mix in the viewer's eye.

At the age of 15, Paul Signac visited the fourth Impressionist exhibition in Paris in the spring of 1879, where he saw works by Gustave Caillebotte, Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, and Camille Pissarro. The next year, Monet's first solo exhibition at the Galerie La Vie moderne played a decisive role in his decision to pursue a career as an artist. In 1883, Signac, mostly self-taught, briefly studied under the academic painter Émile Bin and soon after set up a studio in the trendy Montmartre artist quarter. Monet's work remained his most significant point of reference until the mid-1880s. In 1882, the enthusiastic sailor spent several weeks in Port-en-Bessin in Normandy, where he would return for extended painting campaigns over the next two summers. His landscape paintings from 1883 show the influence of Monet's views of the beach resorts Pourville and Varengeville, which Signac had seen in March of the same year at Paul Durand-Ruel's gallery.

In this depiction, the narrow strip of sandy beach serves as the central axis that shines brightly amid the composition dominated by green and blue tones. Contrasting with the flat rendering of the cloudless sky in the upper half, the other elements in the painting are outlined in shimmering, pastose brushstrokes. The reflections on the gently moving water surface on the right unmistakably evoke Monet's influence. Despite this abstract style, Signac aimed for topographical precision, as evident in the accurately rendered silhouette of the hill on the left, as well as the architectural details in the center of the image. When Signac returned to Port-en-Bessin in 1884, he painted another view of the same spot. The painting "Port-en-Bessin. The Beach" (1884) is now in the possession of the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid.

In the Catalogue raisonné of Signac's paintings compiled by Françoise Cachin and Marina Ferretti-Bocquillon, Port-en-Bessin is listed with the catalogue number 25.