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Lot Essay
Dating from 1883, Port-en-Bessin is an historic early painting by Paul Signac, showing the eponymous town in Normandy where he spent some of the most important, formative months of his career during his first artistic campaigns. This is a luminous, Impressionistic landscape; it is doubtless the combination of its beauty and its importance as a work from a pivotal moment in the career of one of the most influential painters of the Nineteenth Century that it has been previously owned by several important collectors, including the prominent Australian lawyer and philanthropist, Sir Leon Trout. Its brushwork adds an effervescence to the surface that may anticipate his later Pointillism; meanwhile, there is a lush sensuality to the depth of the blue of the sky, the green of the foliage, and the aquamarine waters which are flecked with the refracted reflections of the sails of the boats in the harbour. This picture, which is listed as only the twenty-fifth in the catalogue raisonné, dates from January-March 1883; an annotation in the artist's own handlist explains that it was based on studies created during his stay on the coast the previous year. It was during that trip in 1882 that Signac had gone to Port-en-Bessin for the Summer for the first time, making a pilgrimage to the coast and escaping Paris, a pattern that he would repeat annually from that point onwards, eventually travelling farther and farther. This picture shows the fascination that Signac clearly felt for Port-en-Bessin, where he would return several times; indeed, one of his earliest successes was another view of the seafront painted the following year which he then showed at the inaugural Salon des Indépendants.
Apart from a spell in the studio of Emile Pin in 1883, Signac was essentially self-taught as an artist, yet clearly his devotion to the cause was apparent from a young age. Port-en-Bessin perfectly encapsulates the Impressionist ideals which he was already embracing, and which would evolve over the following years into his own highly-influential Neo-Impressionism. In Port-en-Bessin, it is the Impressionism of Claude Monet in particular that appears to have percolated through into Signac's work. The young artist had already followed the Impressionists since his mid-teens, and around the time that this picture was completed would find himself particularly impressed by the revolutionary one-man exhibition of Monet's works at Durand-Ruel's gallery, which took place in March 1883. Signac would come into frequent contact with the avant garde of the day, both by attending the Impressionist exhibitions and through the legendary supplier of artists' supplies Père Tanguy, whom he encountered at Pin's academy. Already, though, Signac had made the decision to holiday in Port-en-Bessin in part to avoid contact with the Impressionists, instead selecting a town that was largely unknown to artists where he could work in solitude and develop his own aesthetic independently.
Apart from a spell in the studio of Emile Pin in 1883, Signac was essentially self-taught as an artist, yet clearly his devotion to the cause was apparent from a young age. Port-en-Bessin perfectly encapsulates the Impressionist ideals which he was already embracing, and which would evolve over the following years into his own highly-influential Neo-Impressionism. In Port-en-Bessin, it is the Impressionism of Claude Monet in particular that appears to have percolated through into Signac's work. The young artist had already followed the Impressionists since his mid-teens, and around the time that this picture was completed would find himself particularly impressed by the revolutionary one-man exhibition of Monet's works at Durand-Ruel's gallery, which took place in March 1883. Signac would come into frequent contact with the avant garde of the day, both by attending the Impressionist exhibitions and through the legendary supplier of artists' supplies Père Tanguy, whom he encountered at Pin's academy. Already, though, Signac had made the decision to holiday in Port-en-Bessin in part to avoid contact with the Impressionists, instead selecting a town that was largely unknown to artists where he could work in solitude and develop his own aesthetic independently.