Master Art

Executed in 1900, the present sheet was drawn at Samois-sur-Seine, a small village on the river Seine near Fontainebleau, some fifty kilometres southeast of Paris. Paul Signac is known to have visited Samois for several weeks in the fall of 1900, and may also have been there the previous year. This watercolour can be associated with a small number of Neo-Impressionist paintings by Signac depicting the river at Samois-sur-Seine, all painted in 1901, in which similar bargemen appear. These include Samois, The Riverbank, Morning, which was sold at auction in 2013 and is today in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, The Tugboat, Samois in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and The Lock at Samois, in the Ny Carslberg Glypotek in Copenhagen. Also part of this group is a painting of The Barge, Samois, which is in a private collection in Paris. 

A similar Samois subject, with a barge steered by a small bluish figure at the tiller, is also found in a small watercolour by Signac in the Robert Lehman Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In all, Signac produced some two hundred watercolours of Samois - some of which were exhibited at Siegfried Bing’s gallery L’Art Nouveau in June 1902 - along with thirteen oil sketches and six paintings, during his time there.