Paul Signac, Portrieux, The Bathing Cabins, Opus 185 (Beach of the Countess), 1888

The town of Portrieux was in a state of flux when Paul Signac, a Neo-Impressionist painter in the first decade of his career, arrived there in July 1888. For centuries, life in this quiet Breton village had revolved around deep-sea fishing—not, as one might suppose, in the nearby Bay of Saint-Brieuc, but rather off the coast of Newfoundland in present-day Canadian waters. Each year, beginning in 1664, Portrieux and many other French ports sent hundreds of men across the Atlantic to fish for cod from May to October. When the fishermen returned to France, they would sell their annual hauls in La Rochelle, Bordeaux, and Marseille, as well as some Spanish and Italian towns.¹ Their families eagerly awaited these homecomings, as seen in an 1875 painting of Portrieux by Eugène Boudin (1824–98) (Fig. 1).² Men, women, and children are gathered around a beached terre-neuvier, some unloading crates and others simply watching the bustle of activity. However, Portrieux’s economy was already beginning to change drastically when Boudin captured this scene. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, cod fishing declined in popularity as other industries, particularly tourism and oyster farming, became more lucrative and offered residents a less itinerant lifestyle. By the time of Signac’s sojourn, two major hotels had been built in Portrieux to entice would-be visitors, signaling that this societal shift was well underway.³

Signac chose Portrieux for its seaside location. Like many Parisians, he made a yearly exodus from the capital during the summer months. On this trip in the summer of 1888, the artist was accompanied by his mistress, milliner Berthe Roblès, whom he would later marry,⁴ and his friend Jean Ajalbert, a lawyer and fellow anarchist.⁵ The trio avoided the new hotels, opting instead to stay with some local fishermen.⁶ For Signac at least, these lodgings signified personal preference rather than financial necessity; eight years earlier, he had received a sizable inheritance from his late father.⁷ Most tourists reached Portrieux by railway and carriage, taking a train from Paris to Saint-Brieuc and then traveling the remaining distance by road, but Signac and his companions arrived aboard one of Signac’s boats.⁸ In Ajalbert’s memoir, he fondly recalls serving as Signac’s second-in-command at sea and, once in Portrieux, borrowing the vessel’s dinghy to explore the bay. They also used Signac’s boat for an excursion from Portrieux to Jersey, one of the Channel Islands.⁹ Consequently, Signac’s experience of Portrieux was less the typical tourist holiday and more a sailing trip with a prolonged stopover in Brittany. This arrangement suited Signac’s personality, providing him with a restorative break from Paris and also satisfying his desire for new artistic motifs.

During Signac’s three-month stay on the Breton coast, he produced a total of fifteen oil paintings: six studies on panel and nine finished works on canvas. The latter all received opus numbers, akin to musical compositions, something Signac had introduced the previous year.¹⁰ As Peter Flagg has noted, the town of Portrieux itself is virtually absent from this series. Signac was wholly absorbed in the port and its environs.¹¹ His paintings depict the octagonal lighthouse, built in 1867; the jetty, greatly expanded in 1876; the ships anchored in the Bay of Saint-Brieuc; and the sandy beach known as the Plage de la Comtesse. The beach appears in two of the opus-numbered pictures: the Nelson-Atkins work and another painting in private hands (Fig. 2).¹² It is likely that Signac worked on these beachscapes simultaneously, because he told Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) in a letter dated August 24, 1888: “I have eight canvases started and not a single one finished!”¹³ For both beach scenes, Signac painted preparatory oil sketches, similar in size and purpose to the croquetons of his colleague Georges Seurat (1859–91).¹⁴ Signac’s study for Portrieux, The Bathing Cabins, Opus 185 (Beach of the Countess) is compositionally close to the finished painting but seems to have been executed under different lighting conditions (Fig. 3). The dramatic shadows from the cabins, so central to the Nelson-Atkins picture, are absent in the study, suggesting an overcast day.

For many nineteenth-century visitors to Portrieux, the Plage de la Comtesse was one of its main attractions. Both the beach and its adjacent island, the Île de la Comtesse, were named for Marguerite de Mayenne (1208–48), vicomtesse de Dinan-Bécherel, who had received the land as a wedding gift in 1238.¹⁵ The island, which is uninhabited, bisects the horizon in Portrieux, Beach of the Countess, Opus 191 (Fig. 2) but does not appear in Portrieux, The Bathing Cabins, Opus 185, because Signac was facing the opposite direction when he painted the latter. Whereas Opus 191 is oriented toward the northeast, the Nelson-Atkins picture offers a southeastern view of several bathing cabins and the cliffs beyond.¹⁶ The cabins had been a semipermanent fixture on the Plage de la Comtesse since 1866. Locals erected them haphazardly until the municipal council stepped in and required cabin-owners to lease a slice of beachfront for three, six, or nine years at a time. This new regulation restored order but could not forestall every problem. One enterprising visitor from nearby Guingamp outfitted his cabin with sleeping accommodations for six people, much to the dismay of authorities. It took mounting fines and a prefect’s intervention to resolve the situation.¹⁷

Some bathing cabins were available for short-term rentals by tourists. According to a 1908 guidebook, they generally cost one franc per day.¹⁸ Whether Signac, Roblès, or Ajalbert availed themselves of this opportunity in 1888 is unknown, but Signac certainly found the cabins interesting as motifs. In the Kansas City picture, he rendered them with touches of blue, orange, cream, and occasionally purple pigment. Long, geometric shadows amplify the cabins’ presence within the scene. Richard Brettell, noting the absence of people, assumed that Signac must have risen early to paint the Plage de la Comtesse while it was empty,¹⁹ but three current residents have independently identified the time of day as mid- to late afternoon, based on the cabins’ shadows.²⁰ Nearly identical shadows can be seen in an early twentieth-century postcard of the Plage de la Comtesse by Breton photographer Armand Waron (1868–1956) (Fig. 4). Waron captured the beach from a more elevated position but facing the same direction as Signac. Some two dozen figures are scattered across the shore, including several adults lounging on the cabins’ wooden decks and a group of children building a sandcastle.

In all likelihood, Signac witnessed a similar cross-section of human activity as he was painting Portrieux, The Bathing Cabins, Opus 185 but simply chose to omit any beachgoers from view. In fact, only one of the fifteen paintings from his visit to Portrieux contains any people.²¹ Unlike Boudin, who specialized in beachscapes with bourgeois holidaymakers, Signac was more interested in synthesizing the natural and constructed elements of the Plage de la Comtesse than in detailing its human dramas. This preference stemmed partly from Signac’s anarchist politics, which, as Robyn Roslak has shown, influenced his landscape aesthetic. A fervent admirer of anarchist geographer Élisée Reclus, Signac agreed with him that harmonious environments facilitated society’s “intellectual and moral development,” and he took seriously Reclus’s admonition to seek personal rejuvenation in “secluded nature.”²² By representing the Plage de la Comtesse without its usual crowds, Signac signaled his own search for a remote paradise where he and other like-minded individuals could build a utopian community—a search that would lead him, four years later, to Saint-Tropez.²³

After Signac left Portrieux in late September 1888, he began making plans to exhibit his finished works. Within two years, all nine of the opus-numbered paintings had been publicly displayed, some multiple times.²⁴ The Nelson-Atkins picture made its debut in 1890 at the sixth annual exhibition of the Société des Artistes Indépendants, an organization that Signac had helped found in 1884. Reviews were decidedly mixed. Some commentators praised Signac’s methodical approach to color and his ability to capture both “the diaphanous depths of an azure sky” and the placid, “immensely flat” sea.²⁵ Others found his pointillist technique and repetition of motifs stultifying. The harshest critique came from Julien Leclercq:

Signac really bores us. No personality. Dots, dots, nothing but dots. . . . And his seascapes—his seascape, we mean to say, because it’s always the same! With Monet, when we encounter the same tree, the same cliff, or the same rock in ten paintings, we appreciate it; with Signac, we wonder: [is this] some punishment imposed by Seurat?²⁶

Leclercq’s unfavorable comparison of Signac with his predecessor Claude Monet (1840–1926) is not without irony, for it was Monet who had inspired Signac’s choice of profession and to whom Signac later paid homage in his book D’Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionnisme (From Eugène Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism; 1899).²⁷ Leclerq’s dismissive attitude toward Signac’s technique was certainly not shared by all observers. When Signac gave Ajalbert a preview of his Portrieux paintings toward the end of their joint summer vacation, the latter reacted with awe: “Signac showed me his canvases. He works methodically, in small dots. How many per hour? One thousand, two thousand!”²⁸ Unlike Leclercq, Ajalbert recognized that few artists possessed the patience or tenacity for so painstaking a method.

Created during the first decade of Signac’s career, Portrieux, The Bathing Cabins, Opus 185 is a small but important seascape. On a local level, it bears witness to a transitional moment in Portrieux’s history, when tourism began to overtake deep-sea fishing as an economic driver. In personal terms, it reflects Signac’s love of travel, his deep attachment to the sea, and his anarchist sympathies. The late-afternoon shadows reflect Signac’s keen observational skills, but, at the same time, the unoccupied beach demonstrates his willingness to deviate from reality when it suited his aesthetic or political aims. Over the next forty-odd years, Signac would explore countless other ports, producing hundreds of oils and watercolors of the French waterfront, a perennially favorite theme.²⁹

Notes

1. For an excellent account of this industry, see Bernard Corbel, Saint-Quay-Portrieux: Enjeu maritime aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles (Saint-Brieuc: Presses Bretonnes, 1993), 39–48, 124–42. The fishermen used salt to cure and preserve the cod for later consumption.

2. Boudin visited Portrieux repeatedly between 1870 and 1879, producing more than sixty paintings of the town. See Corbel, Saint-Quay-Portrieux, 322. Figure 1 is inscribed “Portrieux” in the lower left corner.

3. The Hôtel du Talus and Hôtel de la Plage opened in 1860 and 1877, respectively. They were soon followed by the Hôtel du Mouton Blanc in 1890. See Corbel, Saint-Quay-Portrieux, 318; and Arnaud Collin, Saint-Quay-Portrieux: Mémoire en images (Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire, France: Éditions Alan Sutton, 2008–2009), 2:12, 2:21.

4. Signac met Roblès in 1882. She modeled for many of his early figure paintings. See Marina Ferretti-Bocquillon et al., Signac: 1863–1935, exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001), 92.

5. Like many Neo-Impressionist painters, Signac sympathized with the left-wing political philosophy known as anarcho-communism and befriended some of its leading proponents, including Jean Grave, Émile Pouget, and Élisée Reclus. See Robert L. and Eugenia W. Herbert, “Artists and Anarchism: Unpublished Letters of Pissarro, Signac and Others: I,” Burlington Magazine 102, no. 692 (November 1960): 472–82.

6. For Ajalbert’s description of their accommodations, see Jean Ajalbert, “Un demi-siècle d’art indépendant,” Les Nouvelles littéraires, no. 591 (February 10, 1934): 4.

7. Signac was his father’s sole heir. Ferretti-Bocquillon et al., Signac, 84, 298.

8. It was not until 1905 that the Paris-Saint-Brieuc line was extended north to Plouha, with a stop at Portrieux’s sister village, Saint-Quay. Corbel, Saint-Quay-Portrieux, 322; and Collin, Saint-Quay-Portrieux, 1:81. Portrieux and Saint-Quay officially merged in 1921 to form what is now known as Saint-Quay-Portrieux.

9. Ajalbert, “Un demi-siècle d’art indépendant,” 4; and Jean Ajalbert, Mémoires en vrac: Au temps du symbolisme, 1880–1890 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1938), 371.

10. For a complete inventory of Signac’s paintings with opus numbers, see Marianne Jakobi, Gauguin-Signac: La genèse du titre contemporain (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2015), 251–74.

11. Peter J. Flagg, “The Neo-Impressionist Landscape” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1988), 131.

12. The latter surfaced at auction in 2018. See The Collection of Peggy and David Rockefeller, vol. 1, 19th and 20th Century Art Evening Sale (New York: Christie’s, May 8, 2018), lot 21, Portrieux, La Comtesse (Opus no. 191).

13. Signac to Pissarro, August 24, 1888, Archives de Camille Pissarro (Paris: Hotel Drouot, November 21, 1975), unpaginated, lot 179. “J’ai 8 toiles commencées et pas une seule finie!” All translations are by Brigid M. Boyle.

14. The Nelson-Atkins has two examples of Seurat’s croquetons: Study for “Bathers at Asnières,” 1883; and Study for "The Channel of Gravelines, Petit Fort Philippe,” 1890. Signac would later shed this habit and renounce painting from nature. In a journal entry dated September 15, 1902, he wrote: “Peindre d’après nature n’est-ce pas une espèce de servilité; un manque de pouvoir créateur?” (Is not painting after nature a form of servile copycatting; a lack of creative power?) Paul Signac, Journal: 1894–1909, ed. Charlotte Hellman (Paris: Gallimard, 2021), 525.

15. Some people mistakenly believe that the beach and island were named for another countess, Julie Tranchant des Tulayes, who purchased the Île de la Comtesse in 1832, but archival records confirm that the name long predates her period of ownership. See Collin, Saint-Quay-Portrieux, 2:111.

16. The latter view was greatly altered in 1990, when the town of Saint-Quay-Portrieux installed a seventeen-hectare marina at the southern end of the Plage de la Comtesse. I thank Florence Lévêque, Office de Tourisme de Saint-Quay-Portrieux, for this information.

17. For this history and anecdote, see Corbel, Saint-Quay-Portrieux, 267, 285; and Collin, Saint-Quay-Portrieux, 2:61.

18. Paul Joanne, Bretagne: Les routes les plus fréquentées (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1908), 32. For comparison, hotel rates in Portrieux averaged five to seven francs per day. See Corbel, Saint-Quay-Portrieux, 318; and Collin, Saint-Quay-Portrieux, 2:12.

19. For Brettell’s interpretation, see Richard R. Brettell and Joachim Pissarro, Manet to Matisse: Impressionist Masters from the Marion and Henry Bloch Collection, exh. cat. (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2007), 111.

20. I am grateful to Florence Lévêque, Office de Tourisme de Saint-Quay-Portrieux; Véronique Lacour, Les Amis de Saint-Quay-Portrieux; and Mathieu Petitjean, author of Saint-Quay-Portrieux: À l’abri de la ronce bénie (Saint-Jacut-de-la-Mer, France: Jean-Pierre Bihr, 1998), for their helpful comments about the shadows.

21. The lone exception is Paul Signac, Portrieux, The Port (Study), 1888, oil on panel, 5 7/8 x 9 13/16 in. (15 x 25 cm), Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, PD.9-1959.

22. Robyn Roslak, Neo-Impressionism and Anarchism in Fin-de-Siècle France: Paintings, Politics, and Landscape (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2007), 7, 155. See also Roslak’s discussion of water as an anarchist metaphor for social harmony in Signac’s marine paintings, in Robyn Roslak, “Symphonic Seas, Oceans of Liberty: Paul Signac’s La Mer: Les Barques (Concarneau),” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 4, no. 1 (Spring 2005): http://19thc-artworldwide.org/index.php/component/content/article/64-spring05article/302-symphonic-seas-oceans-of-liberty-paul-signacs-la-mer-les-barques-concarneau.

23. In 1892, Signac followed the lead of his colleague and fellow anarchist Henri Edmond Cross (1856–1910) in relocating to the south of France. Cross had moved from Paris to Cabasson the previous year, and his rhapsodic descriptions of the town’s scenery and climate convinced Signac to make a similar leap. He set his sights on Saint-Tropez, initially renting a villa and later purchasing property there in 1897. For both Cross and Signac, their choice of the Mediterranean coast was motivated, in part, by their politics. Reclus and others characterized this area as “well-suited to the dream of an anarchist utopia” in their writings, praising its ample sunshine, access to the sea, and pre-modern character; see Roslak, Neo-Impressionism and Anarchism in Fin-de-Siècle France, 145–47. This rhetoric persuaded Cross, Signac, and other Neo-Impressionists to explore Provence, with many of them settling there long-term.

24. Signac exhibited two paintings of Portrieux at the Cinquième exposition de la Société des Artistes Indépendants, Paris, September 3–October 4, 1889; seven at Les XX: XVIe exposition annuelle, Brussels, January 18–February 23, 1890; four at the Sixième exposition de la Société des Artistes Indépendants, Paris, March 20–April 27, 1890; and one at the Théâtre Libre, Paris, for a period of about ten years (1888–98).

25. See Jules Christophe, “Causerie: L’Impressionnisme; L’exposition des artistes indépendants,” Journal des artistes, no. 13 (April 6, 1890): 102; and Georges Lecomte, “Beaux-Arts: L’Exposition des néo-impressionnistes, Pavillon de la ville de Paris (Champs-Elysées),” Art et critique 2, no. 44 (March 29, 1890): 204. Lecomte lauded Signac’s rendering of “les profondeurs diaphanes d’un ciel azur” and the “immensément plane” sea.

26. J[ulien] L[eclercq], “Beaux-arts: Aux Indépendants,” Mercure de France 1, no. 5 (May 1890): 175. “Signac nous ennuie bien. Aucune personnalité. Des points, des points, et c’est tout. . . . Et ses marines, sa marine voulons-nous dire, car c’est toujours la même! Chez Monet, lorsqu’en dix tableaux nous retrouvons le même arbre ou la même falaise, le même rocher, nous le sentons; chez Signac, nous nous le demandons: quelque pensum infligé par Seurat.” The latter remark positions Signac as a disciple of Seurat, whose pointillist technique and ideas about color theory strongly influenced him in the mid-1880s.

27. Signac decided to become a painter after attending Monet’s first solo exhibition in 1880. The two artists were in periodic contact for more than four decades, and Monet even visited Signac in Les Andelys in September 1921. See Ferretti-Bocquillon et al., Signac, 69, 317.

28. Ajalbert, Mémoires en vrac, 371. “Il travaille méthodiquement, au petit point. Combien à l’heure? Cent mille, deux mille!” Emphasis in the original.

29. By one scholar’s tally, 484 of Signac’s 611 documented oil paintings depict water. See Marina Ferretti Bocquillon, “Signac, la mer toujours recommencée,” in Marina Ferretti Bocquillon and Pierre Curie, eds., Signac: Les harmonies colorées, exh. cat. (Brussels: Fonds Mercator, 2021), 24–37, at 27.

Paul Signac painted Portrieux, The Bathing Cabins, Opus 185 (Beach of the Countess) on a fine, tightly woven, lightweight fabric with a plain weave. The painting was edge lined sometime before 1994,¹ leaving the reverse of the canvas visible and the original tacking margins intact. The painting retains its original five-member stretcher with half-mitered bridle joints.² All ten keys are present. Both canvas and stretcher have a stenciled artist supplier mark for Tasset et L’Hôte (Fig. 5).³ The stretcher has a second artist supplier mark from Bourgeois Aîné,⁴ indicating that the stretcher was constructed by Bourgeois Aîné, then Tasset et L’Hôte stretched the canvas and sold it. With infrared (IR) imaging, two more marks on the stretcher appear. On the proper right vertical member is a stenciled “8” indicating the painting’s size as the French standard-format no. 8.⁵ There is faint handwriting on the upper horizontal member that reads, “42bis Rue de Paris / Asnières,” the artist’s address at the time.⁶

The canvas was commercially primed with a thin, evenly applied off-white ground layer, which fully extends to the edges of the tacking margins. Signac allowed much of the ground layer to show through between brushstrokes and passages of paint (Fig. 6). Under magnification, particles of dry, dark media are visible between brushstrokes, indicating Signac used a medium like Conté crayon for his underdrawing. Signac first began working in Conté crayon in emulation of his friend and mentor Georges Seurat (1859–1891).⁷ He quickly took up the medium for preparatory sketches for paintings, such as Study for “Sunday”: Woman at the Window; Man Reading a Newspaper (1888–89; private collection), as well as to create stand-alone drawings, like The Bench (1887; private collection).⁸

Infrared reflectography shows a sketchy but complete underdrawing (Fig. 7). Signac marked the contours of the hillside, horizon, and beach and established the shapes of the bathing cabins and deck. Completely absent in the final painted composition, several roughly sketched figures populate the beach in the IR reflectogram. On the far left, there are figures at the edge of the water, possibly an adult with several children. In the center is a figure seated on the sand, and there are some sketchy lines that may represent another seated figure slightly further in the distance. There are two figures standing by the cabins on the beach, and there are more lines on the deck which may suggest another figure.

Signac made several other small changes to the composition. He did not sketch the shadows in his underdrawing, adding them only later as he painted. He lowered the line of the cliff by approximately three centimeters and shifted the cabins’ rooflines. He also adjusted the angle of the deck planks and omitted a third set of sketched steps from the deck to the sand.

Painted two years after The Château Gaillard, View from My Window, Petit-Andely (1886; The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art), The Bathing Cabins, Opus 185 (Beach of the Countess) represents Signac as a confident Neo-Impressionist artist. The compositional elements are more defined and linear, a trend which increases among his mature works. In comparison to the preparatory oil sketch mentioned above in the catalogue entry, Signac positioned himself closer to the green cabin and turned slightly toward the buildings for the Nelson-Atkins painting (Fig. 8). The result is a more synthesized, structured composition with a unified color story of contrasting blue-violets and yellow-oranges. The red cabin is now absent, hidden behind its neighbors, and the green cabin is cropped from the right edge. The deck, portrayed simply in the sketch, extends to occupy the lower right corner, amplifying the sense of depth with its long, linear planks. The deck itself and the shadows in front of it both reference cabins beyond the picture plane, creating an enclosed, intimate beach vista looking out to the sea.

Signac’s palette remained unchanged from 1883 onward, according to his writing.⁹ The painting is composed of divided brushstrokes, though Signac also included less fragmented brushwork. For example, the shadows between the deck planks are long, continuous strokes, as are the rooflines of the cabins on the beach. He used balayé strokes to add luminosity and texture to the sand (Fig. 9).¹⁰ In much of the rest of the composition, Signac applied color, then returned with small dabs, adding both similar tones to create gradations and contrasting colors for added light and shadow.

Much of Signac’s brushwork is wet-over-dry. For example, orange dabs sit atop blue brushstrokes over nearly white paint, with no blending or disruption of the paint texture (Fig. 10). He applied paint dryly, resulting in skipping strokes which often show underlying brushwork or the ground layer. There is a clear example in the railing of the cabins in the upper right. Signac painted blue and white horizontal brushstrokes over a vertical stroke with heavy impasto (Fig. 11). There are several areas in which wet-over-wet painting has occurred, likely inadvertently. Some occurs in the sand, most noticeably when dissimilar colors, like pink and blue, are adjacent and mix together. There is also a surprising amount of blending and mixing at the lower left corner of the nearest bathing cabin (Fig. 12). The painting was signed “P. Signac 88” in the lower left corner in bright, divided dabs of opaque orange (Fig. 13a), and in the lower right corner, Signac added “Op. 185” in deep blue with a very thin brush (Fig. 13b).¹¹

The painting is in fair condition overall. Small splits and losses at the foldover edge were stabilized by the edge lining. In the tacking margins, the ground layer is quite friable and actively powdering. There is cracking throughout the painting, but it is not obvious under normal viewing conditions. Mechanical cracking along the foldover edge has led to lifting and loss of the paint and ground layer. Some of the losses have been previously filled and retouched;¹² others are untreated, showing bare canvas. Minor consolidation treatments have been undertaken to address instability, the most recent of which occurred in December 2025.¹³ There are losses in the inscription in the lower right, and both inscriptions show some abrasion (see Fig. 13a-b). At some time in the painting’s history, it was harshly and unevenly cleaned. Areas of thin paint and exposed ground are abraded, exposing areas of bare canvas. Embedded grime remains on exposed ground and in interstices between brushstrokes.

There is a thin layer of varnish on the surface of the painting.¹⁴ Under normal viewing conditions, the surface appears matte but not chalky, although any specular illumination reveals the gloss of the coating. The varnish remains in good condition with no visible discoloration. There are a handful of areas across the painting with yellow or brown resinous surface accretions. The dabs of paint below the accretions appear to have some associated deterioration or surface pitting. Some areas of flattened impasto and impressions in wet paint along the left and right edges indicate that the painting was placed in a frame before it was fully dry. Along the right edge, there is a buildup of wax on the surface of the paint with embedded gold-colored powder, likely related to its framing.

Notes

1. Forrest Bailey, examination report, November 9, 1994, NAMA conservation file, 2015.13.23.

2. See illustration 33 in Mark Bockrath and Barbara A. Buckley, “Historical and Original Stretchers and Strainers,” American Institute for Conservation (AIC) Wiki, accessed November 21, 2025, https://www.conservation-wiki.com/wiki/Stretchers_and_Strainers:_Materials_and_Equipment.

3. Tasset et L’Hôte operated from 1887 to 1899. Pascal Labreuche, “Tasset et Lhote,” Guide Labreuche: Guide historique des fournisseurs de matériel pour Artistes à Paris, 1790–1960, 2018, https://www.guide-labreuche.com/en/collection/businesses/tasset-et-lhote.

4. While the stamp is difficult to decipher, it visually matches Bourgeois Aîné’s mark of a “B” inside a horizontal diamond. Labreuche, “Bourgeois Aîné,” Guide Labreuche, https://www.guide-labreuche.com/en/collection/businesses/bourgeois-aine.

5. In the 1888 Bourgeois Aîné catalog, a no. 8 paysage measured 46 by 33 centimeters. See David Bomford, Jo Kirby, John Leighton, and Ashok Roy, Art in the Making: Impressionism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 46.

6. See the chronology in Marina Ferretti-Bocquillon, Anne Distel, John Leighton, and Susan Alyson Stein, Signac: 1863–1935, exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001), 298.

7. Marina Ferretti-Bocquillon, “Signac: Drawings and Watercolors,” in Ferretti-Bocquillon et al., Signac: 1863–1935, 24.

8. Sjraar van Heugten, “Signac: The Graphic Worker,” in Ferretti-Bocquillon et al., Signac: 1863–1935, 33.

9. In an unpublished letter to Amédée Ozenfant (collection of Amédée Ozenfant, Cannes), Signac described his palette; quoted in Wiliam Innes Homer, Seurat and the Science of Painting (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1985), 151.

10. Homer describes balayé strokes as “swept over or crisscrossed,” and they were used often by Seurat. See Homer, Seurat and the Science of Painting, 60.

11. For a brief description of Signac’s use of opus numbers, see Richard R. Brettell and Joachim Pissarro, Manet to Matisse: Impressionist Masters from the Marion and Henry Bloch Collection (Kansas City: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2007), 111.

12. Bailey, examination report, November 9, 1994, and treatment report, January 4, 1995, NAMA conservation file, 2015.13.23.

13. Susan Enterline, treatment report, December 3, 2025, and Mary Schafer, treatment report, May 24, 2007, NAMA conservation file, 2015.13.23.

14. Solvent testing carried out by the author confirmed the varnish is a synthetic resin. Several documents describe the painting as unvarnished or having no surface film (Bailey, examination report, November 9, 1994; and Scott Heffley, acquisition report, May 29, 2015, NAMA conservation file, 2015.13.23), but it seems likely that it was varnished during the same treatment campaign in which it was edge lined. The paint film is probably damaged and undersaturated from its past overcleaning, and the thin coat of varnish helps to approximate its original appearance.