“Entrance to the Grand Canal, Venice”
“Entrance to the Grand Canal, Venice” is a colorful oil on canvas painting made by the French Neo-Impressionist artist, Paul Signac, from 1905. This piece is done in the pointillism style.
In this painting, Signac depicts the entrance to the Grand Canal in Venice, Italy. The buildings visible in the background are the Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute and the Dogana da Mar. The buildings sit on a triangular piece of land south of the Grand Canal at the location where the Grand Canal meets the greater Giudecca Canal. In the foreground, a row of gondolas is neatly lined up with their reflections dancing in the water. The gondolas are the perfect design for the narrow canals and lagoons in Venice.
Signac was an avid sailor. After 1892, he spent a lot of time sailing into port cities across the Mediterranean, on his own small boat which kept its base at Saint Tropez, France. He reached as far as Constantinople in the Ottoman Empire. From these trips, Signac would produce sketches, many of which were turned into large paintings. This painting is likely from one of his sketches drawn on his travels.
Along with Georges Seurat, Signac worked in the painting technique known as pointillism. As Neo-Impressionists, their unique style was influenced by science and math. Unlike Seurat who painted solely with points, Signac painted with longer dashes. This was inspired by Byzantine mosaics that Signac saw when traveling abroad.
One of the striking things that separates pointillism from impressionism is that impressionist artists blended the colors on the canvas whereas pointillism artists placed only points of color or pigment on the canvas. The points of color, when side by side, allowed the human eye to mix and blend the colors when viewed from a distance.
“Entrance to the Grand Canal, Venice” is currently on display at the Toledo Museum of Art in Toledo, Ohio, in the United States.
For more on Paul Signac, please visit his short biography here.
You can find more artists to learn about here.
