Paul Signac

Paul Victor Jules Signac was born in Paris on November 11, 1863 into a family of a well-to-do master harness-maker.

He started his career in architecture, but abandoned this at the age of 18 to pursue a career as a painter.

He sailed around the coasts of Europe, painting the landscapes he encountered. He also painted scenes of cities in France in his later years.

In 1884 he met Monet and Georges Seurat. He was struck by the systematic working methods of Seurat, and his theory of colors and became Seurat's faithful supporter. Under his influence he abandoned the short brushstrokes of impressionism to experiment with scientifically juxtaposed small dots of pure color, intended to combine and blend not on the canvas but in the viewer's eye, the defining feature of pointillism.

Many of Signac's paintings are of the French coast. He left the capital each summer, to stay in the south of France in the village of Collioure or at St. Tropez, where he bought a house and invited his friends. In March, 1889, he visited Vincent van Gogh at Arles. The next year he made a short trip to Italy, seeing Genoa, Florence, and Naples.

Signac loved sailing and began to travel in 1892, sailing a small boat to almost all the ports of France, to Holland, and around the Mediterranean as far as Constantinople, basing his boat at St. Tropez, which he "discovered." From his various ports of call, Signac brought back vibrant, colorful watercolors, sketched rapidly from nature. From these sketches, he painted large studio canvases that are carefully worked out in small, mosaic-like squares of color, quite different from the tiny, variegated dots previously used by Seurat.

Signac himself experimented with various media. As well as oil paintings and watercolors he made etchings, lithographs, and many pen-and-ink sketches composed of small, laborious dots. The neo-impressionists influenced the next generation; Signac inspired Henri Matisse and André Derain in particular, thus playing a decisive role in the evolution of Fauvism.

As president of the Société des Artistes Indépendants from 1908 until his death, Signac encouraged younger artists (he was the first to buy a painting by Matisse) by exhibiting the controversial works of the Fauves and the Cubists.


[edit] Private Life
November 7, 1892, Signac married Berthe Roblès at the townhall of the 18th district in Paris; witness to the wedding were Alexandre Lemonier, Maximilien Luce, Camille Pissarro and Georges Lecomte.

November 1897, the Signac couple moved to an appartement of the just finished Castel Béranger constructed by Hector Guimard, and little later, in December of the same year acquired a house in Saint-Tropez called La Hune; there the painter had a vast studio constructed, inaugurated August 16, 1898.

September 1913, Signac rented a house at Antibes, where he settled with Jeanne Selmersheim-Desgrange, who gave birth to their daughter Ginette, October 2, 1913. Meanwhile, Signac had leaves La Hune as well as the Castel Beranger apartment to Berthe: he stayed in cordial relation with her for his lifetime.

April 6, 1927, Signac adopts Ginette, his up to then illegitime daughter

August 15, 1935, at the age of seventy-two, Paul Signac died in Paris from prostate cancer. His corpse was cremated and, three days later, August 18, buried at the Père-Lachaise cemetry.