Beach at Saint-Briac

Beach at Saint-Briac (1890) was painted on Signac's return to the Brittany coast he had first visited in 1885, when he was still transitioning from Impressionism to divisionism. By 1890 his technique was fully matured, and the familiar beach at Saint-Briac-sur-Mer provided a testing ground for his developed systematic method applied to the cool Atlantic light of Brittany. The contrast with his contemporary Saint-Tropez paintings demonstrates divisionism's adaptability to radically different climates. Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

The beach's pale sand and grey-blue Atlantic sea are rendered in cooler, more restrained dots than Signac's Mediterranean work. The divisionist surface is systematic but adapted to the diffuse northern light, with blue-grey and muted warm tones predominating over the warm primaries of his Provençal paintings.