Who Is Paul Signac's Place Des Lices, St. Tropez?

Imagine pixels on a television painted with oil on a canvas, this pointillism concept was portrayed in Paul Signac’s Place des Lices, St. Tropez. In 1893, color theory, the idea of mixing colors and the visual effects of color combinations, was becoming well known. He and another artist, Seurat, developed neo impressionism, also known as pointillism or divisionism. As an artist, he focused on landscapes and using vivid, contrasting colors to convey the effects of light on his objects (Gerlings 100). Signac’s Place des Lices, St. Tropez, has many Hellenistic qualities such as motion in the painting, the use of color to portray light and shadow, and the illustration of emotion in an everyday scene.

Paul Signac painted Place des Lices, St. Tropez, while only using dots to create a solitary picture of a man sitting on a bench by himself in the midst of trees. The older man is sitting in a clearing between the trees with only his back visible to the viewer. He has his back slightly slouched allowing him to be comfortable while wearing a tan farm hat, blue jeans, and a dark jacket. Unlike the regular use of brown, Signac uses dark blues and violets to create the shadows of the long, curvy trees so tall that all of the branches do not fit in the painting.

Tropez displays Hellenism through emotion in an everyday scene. The solitary man on the bench gives a lonely feeling. Signac “aimed to produce correspondences between emotional states and the forms, lines, and colors presented on the canvas” (Seiferle). As an impressionist, Signac wanted to do more with his painting. He used dark colors surrounding the man to create a isolated mindset of the viewer. Signac created “sadness by using dark, cold colours and by pointing lines downwards” (“Paul Signac (1863-1935)”).The curved lines of the trees seem to lean in towards the bench drawing the eyes directly at the man. The complex theory is balanced out with the simplicity of the everyday