Meeting

The young Signac begins his painting career as an impressionist. That changes in 1884 when he meets Georges Seurat. He not only becomes a close friend, but is also deeply impressed by Seurat’s colour theories and pointillist painting technique.

Dots and smudges

The dining room is an early pointillist work by Signac. Here he avidly experiments with colour and the effects of complementary pairs of colours, mainly orange and blue.
Like his friend, he no longer mixes the colours on the palette, but places them side by side on the canvas in small dots and smudges. Seen from a distance, they give the colour effect that the painter intended.

Interior scene

In this painting, a woman and an older man sit at a table. A housemaid brings them the mail. The two women and the man are hardly people of flesh and blood. They seem rigid in their movement and wrapped up in themselves. The complete lack of interaction between the figures gives this ordinary, everyday scene an uncomfortable atmosphere.

 

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   The French painter and graphic artist Paul Signac actually wanted to become a writer, but decided to take up painting after seeing Claude Monet’s first impressionist paintings. Signac did not attend art college, he taught himself through many hours of sketching and experimentation. The encounter with Georges Seurat in 1884 changed his life. Together they did research into colour and the effects of colour contrasts and developed a new style of painting that later became known as pointillism. The technique consisted of mixing colours with white only and applying these directly – in small dots – onto the canvas. The colours only merge together in the eye of the observer when seen from a distance. Signac was the theorist of this movement, which would have a big influence on the work of artists including Vincent van Gogh, who was also a friend, and Piet Mondriaan.
   In The breakfast Signac used mainly blue-yellow and orange-green as contrasting and complementary colours. The figures (his mother, grandfather and the housemaid) are shown frontally or in profile and are standing or sitting motionless, without showing any expression. They have not been portrayed, but are painted as types, as examples of a timeless bourgeoisie. In that sense the painting is also a critical commentary on the self-satisfaction of civic life and the authoritarian capitalism that Signac, who was a confirmed anarchist, and his likeminded friends, rejected.

 

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