Mill of Edam

Mill of Edam (1896) was painted during Signac's 1896 voyage along the Dutch coast, the same trip that produced The Basin of Flushing. Edam, famous for its cheese and its canals, gave Signac a quintessentially Dutch subject — the windmill reflected in still water — that was almost iconographically the opposite of his beloved Mediterranean harbours. Bringing his divisionist technique to the Dutch landscape tested its capacity to convey grey northern light and flat, watery terrain. Museum Barberini.

The mill's characteristic silhouette against a flat Dutch sky is rendered in warm brick-tone mosaic patches contrasted with the cool grey-blue of sky and canal. Still water reflections provide the horizontal field of optical colour mixing central to Signac's compositional method. The palette is noticeably cooler than his Mediterranean works.