Harbour Scene

ca. 1894

With his friend the painter Georges Seurat, Paul Signac developed a style called Divisionism, which relies on the viewer’s eye to optically blend the artist’s small marks of bright, contrasting color. This luminous color lithograph, related to an oil painting of the same subject, harmonizes contrasting shades of blue and orange to convey a sense of a lightfilled port and sunstruck waves. The technology of color lithography may in fact have been an influence on Divisionist technique: as early as the 1840s, lithographers were relying on patterns of stippled dots in contrasting colors to produce the illusion of a wider color range in their prints.