Brief Report

This picture in portrait format was painted a year before the publication of Signac’s famous treatise D’Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionnisme [Signac 1899] and shows a classical composition of a harbour on the Italian Riviera (fig. 1). Signac planned all the forms of the composition in blue paint with a brush on a thinly primed canvas with its weave still clearly discernible (fig. 8). The painting consists of a multitude of mostly impasto brush-strokes and dabs. The individual applications of paint become more and more concentrated through the step-by-step application in particular in the dark compositional elements, resulting in a maximum of four superimposed or overlapping paint layers (figs. 9, 10). Colour cells richly differentiated in their density of application, their size and their direction are a distinguishing feature of this picture. Within any given motif, one direction of paint application is dominant. The fact that adjacent applications of different-coloured paint rarely mix suggests that not only was the work spread over a number of sessions, but also that this picture was painted in the studio. In his journal, Signac noted that for the painting Capo di Noli he aimed for “extreme polychromy” and that to prepare as brilliant a colour effect as possible, he had used samples of dyed silk [Cachin/Ferretti-Bocquillon 2001, p. 228]. Faithful to his colour-theoretical approach, for this picture Signac used red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet, which were applied either pure, or, if blended, then only either with white or with a spectrally adjacent colour. A systematic approach can be seen in the composition of the local, light and shadow tones of the individual motifs. We of- ten find combinations of two spectral neighbours, which are then contrasted with the respective complementary colours in the shadows. One peculiarity concerns a revision of the painting in the peripheral regions, presumably in the artist’s own hand. Here a fine pencil line on the paint layer runs parallel to the outside edge at a distance of 0.6-1.2 cm, covered in many places by overlying strokes of paint. The individual strokes of paint take up the coloration of the underlying painting mostly in paler tones and thus form a kind of internal frame inseparable from the picture (fig. 7). This was created only after the picture was completed, indeed after the signature was added, as proved by individual strokes which marginally overlap Signac’s name in the bottom left-hand corner. But also the fact of a deviating fluorescence of this subsequently painted frame does not allow any clear conclusion on the exact time of this revision.

Paul Signac
Capo di Noli, 1898, oil on canvas, 93.5 x 75.0 cm, WRM Dep. FC 682

Paul Signac

born on 11 November 1863 in Paris,
died on 15 August 1935 ibidem

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Further illustrations:

Fig. 02

Verso, lined


Fig. 03

Raking light


Fig. 04

Transmitted light


Fig. 05

UV fluorescence


Fig. 06

IR reflectogram


Fig. 07

Detail, signature


Fig. 08

Detail, blue underdrawing line, microscopic photograph
(M = 1 mm)


Fig. 09

Detail, raking light, sailing boat and water


Fig. 10

Detail, tree-trunks and bushes


Fig. 11

Detail, changes in yellow paint, microscopic photograph (M = 1 mm)


Fig. 12

Cross-section of a paint-layer sample from the area shown in fig. 11, from top to bottom: degraded yellow paint layer with fungus-like material growing from it (cadmium sulphide
with a zinc component), orange paint layer (pure cadmium sulphide), green paint layer (chromium-based pigment);
magnified 200x