Paul Signac (1863–1935) was born in Paris on 11 November 1863 into a bourgeois family. His parents wanted him to become an architect, but he preferred to draw the Seine, and after his father’s death he took a room in Montmartre and taught himself to paint. In 1884 he met Claude Monet and Georges Seurat. Struck by Seurat’s systematic method and his theory of colour, he became his closest ally, and in the same year helped found the Société des Artistes Indépendants, an exhibiting society with no admission jury.
Under Seurat’s influence he abandoned the short brushstrokes of Impressionism for small dots of pure colour, meant to blend in the viewer’s eye rather than on the canvas. He showed at the last Impressionist exhibition in 1886, and after Seurat’s death in 1891 became the spokesman of Neo-Impressionism. A passionate sailor, he took a small boat to almost every port in France and around the Mediterranean, and from 1892 he made Saint-Tropez his base, discovering it for painters. From each port he brought back bright watercolours, and from these he built large studio canvases in broad, mosaic-like squares of colour.
From 1908 until his death he was president of the Indépendants, and he used the post to exhibit the Fauves and the Cubists. He was the first to buy a painting by Matisse. He died in Paris on 15 August 1935.