During his first summer as a Neo-Impressionist, Signac stayed in the Seine Valley in Normandy. At the beginning of June he took up residence in Les Andelys, not far from Giverny, and waited for Lucien Pissarro to join him. The site, which is on a bend of the Seine some sixty miles west of Paris, is especially beautiful, and Signac, charmed by the vividness of the colors and subject matter, wrote to Seurat at Honfleur. The latter's response was typical: "You see Les Andelys as colorful. I see the Seine [as] an almost indefinable gray sea, even under the strongest sun and blue sky."1

If Signac did not spend the summer at the seashore - at Saint-Briac, for example, which he recommended to Jean Ajalbert2 - it was because he was serving on the hanging committee of the second Salon of the Société des Artistes Indépendants and so did not want to be far from Paris. When the exhibition opened on August 21, it included four landscapes from Les Andelys, dated June -July and August 1886 (nos. 366-69). Commenting on these pictures, Fénéon wrote: "The most recent ones are also the most luminous and complete. The colors provoke each other to mad chromatic flights--they exult, shout! And the Seine flows on, and in its waters flow the sky and the vegetation along the riverside."3

Signac returned to Les Andelys after the open- ing and continued working on this series of land- scapes, finishing ten in all. The present work was among those painted in August. The artist picked a spot downstream where the ruins of Chàteau Gaillard towered over the village houses. The Seine dominates the composition, with a wooded on the right. When Signac island appearing ex- hibited this picture at the 1887 Salon des Indé- pendants together with three other paintings from Les Andelys, Gustave Kahn was enthusiastic about the liveliness and luminosity of the landscapes:

"Signac perpetually returns to bends in the river full of wooded isles, reflected trees, closely hud- ded houses, peasant women washing, sparkling patchworks of cultivated fields. It is the blaze of the Mediterranean sun that is fixed in these land- scapes, imbued with the joy of things and illus- trated with fantasies of light."4

NOTES 1 Letter from Georges Seurat to Signac, June 25, 1886, Signac Archives. 2 Ajalbert 1886b, p. 3. 3 Fénéon 1886b, p. 301. 4 Kahn 1887, p. 230.

Signed and dated, lower P. right: P. Signac 86? Musée d'Orsay, Paris, acquired by dation, 1996 (RF 1996-6)