Focus on Sailboats and Estuary and analyze the Painting.
In the late 1880s, Van Rysselberghe painted a number of pointillist works on the coasts of Normandy and Brittany, which seem to have been inspired by the coastal views of Grandcamp and Honfleur realized by Seurat, whose waterscapes often draw the viewer in with a close-up view of land or a pier at the side of the canvas, and then give way to an expanse of ocean and sky separated by a thin wedge of land. The work is unsigned and was in a private collection for a long time until 1982.Sailboats and Estuary is typical of both the theme and the neo-impressionist style that Van Rysselberghe had learned directly from the movement's leading artists: he started entirely from the theory of color as defined by Seurat, more specifically, his "doctrine of simultaneous contrasts", which he had studied extensively. He meticulously juxtaposes unmixed dark blue, crimson, yellow, green and white brushstrokes against each other in arithmetically determined proportions, as in a kind of mosaic. Ultimately this leads to an extremely balanced, tightly styled composition, with an almost classical rigor. In a synthetic way he allows the fragmented color keys to flow into a monochrome overall image, where the separate color keys blocks give an almost glittering effect. With this he achieves the maximum effect of the special light effect propagated by Seurat in his color theory, also referred to as luminism.
A reviewer of the Parisian art magazine La Plume wrote of the painting on April 1, 1898, "it shows in all its facets the full luminous beauty that the new pointillist school can offer."
Grandcamp La Plume Normandy Paris Brittany Honfleur