Brief Report

The study with the depiction of the Seine landscape near Samois was painted as part of a cycle of 14 oil studies, which Signac executed at the end of 1899 and beginning of 1900 [Cachin/Ferretti-Bocquillon 2000, p. 243]. For this series and thus also for this study bearing the number 8, Signac used an artists’ board on which was pasted a pre-primed cotton cloth (carton toile), a support which can be found in altogether 33 small-format paintings in his oeuvre. This one, which was presumably executed in the presence of the motif, was preceded by a drawn compositional lay-in, in which the contours of the landscape are coarsely sketched (fig. 5). The subsequent execution in colour integrates the white ground in all parts. The loose paint applications are dominated by short, often arc or hook-shaped brush-strokes. The riverbank in the left foreground by contrast is characterized by longer linear brushstrokes (fig. 3). The different thicknesses of the paint applications seems to be primarily dependent on the proportion of white in paint that was often mixed rapidly. The higher the proportion of white, the more impasto and also the more matt the paint appears, in a painting that has remained unvarnished to this day. The traces of scratching or smearing running vertically down from the top edge of the picture, which were created while the paint was still wet, could have been caused by sliding the picture into the lid of a painting case or some other container (figs. 3, 6). Numerous squashed impasto areas have paper fibres adhering to them, which resemble those of the paper covering of the board verso. They could easily come from another study in the series which was laid with its back to the still wet paint on this one. Striking colour changes and degradations affect above all those paint applications with admixtures of yellow, orange and green (figs. 10, 11). The changes are very varied in nature, and often no longer permit any reconstruction of the pristine coloration; they are due to different proportions of cadmium-yellow pigments whose instability was probably itself due to production methods [Leone/Burnstock/Jones 2005]. Signac gave away this painting, which he never signed or dated, to his fellow-artist Charles Angrand in 1899, i.e. almost as soon as it was painted.

Paul Signac
Samois, Study No. 8, 1899, oil on artist board, 27.1 x 34.7 cm, WRM Dep. FC 684

Paul Signac

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

Brief report with complete data as downloadable pdf-file

Further illustrations:

Fig. 02

Verso


Fig. 03

Raking light


Fig. 04

UV fluorescence


Fig. 05

IR reflectogram


Fig. 06

X-ray


Fig. 07

Detail, company label verso


Fig. 08

Detail, IR reflectogram, houses on the bank


Fig. 09

Detail, houses on the bank with visible underdrawing lines


Fig. 10

Detail, paint applications in the area of the bank with underdrawing lines and colour changes


Fig. 11

Detail, heavily degraded paint with transparent crust-like coating and white efflorescences, microscopic photograph (M = 1 mm)