Paul Signac (French, 1863–1935) Lot n° 33

Petit Andély, Château Gaillard, Signed, located and dated 'P. Signac/Petit Andely [sic] 1923' bottom right, watercolor and pencil heightened with white gouache on paper Sheet size: 10 x 16 in. (25.4 x 40.6cm)Collection La Faille, Paris. Charles E. Slatkin, New York, New York. Acquired directly from the above. Private Collection, New York. EXHBITED: Santa Barbara Museum, 1959 (per label verso). San Diego Museum, 1960 (per label verso). NOTE: In early June 1886, Paul Signac moved to the small town of Les Andelys in Normandy, not too far from Giverny. The artist was first introduced to the beauty of this quaint area by Camille Pissarro, who lived in the nearby village of Éragny-sur-Epte. There, Signac completed a series of exactly ten landscape paintings in which he explored the full potential of his new pointillist approach, applying small dots of pure color directly onto the canvas rather than blending them on a palette. Upon his return to Paris in the fall, Signac showed four of his works at the Salon de la Société des Artistes Indépendants, much to the public's surprise. Art critic Félix Fénéon praised them for their special luminosity and their boldness: "The colours provoke each other to mad chromatic flights-they exult, shout!" (Félix Fénéon, Les Impressionnistes en 1886, Paris, 1886, p. 301, quoted in Marina Ferretti, Signac 1863-1935, New York, 2001, p. 121). While Les Andelys served as the subject of Signac's early pointillist canvases of 1886, it would also be revisited during a period in which Signac was utilizing the watercolor medium to achieve new artistic effects. The present work, painted upon the artist's return to the town in 1921, is an example of Signac's efforts to develop a satisfying synthetization of color and forms. Executed en plein-air along the banks of the river Seine, the work revisits many of the motifs that Signac found attractive in Les Andelys in his earlier paintings, such as the verd