#harbour

He's usually filed with the Fauves — the 'wild beasts' famous for screaming colour — but apparently what he actually loved was grey weather and busy water, and he spent years travelling around Europe painting one port after another.

A whole movement got its name from a review mocking this one — the critic used the word as an insult, supposedly, and it stuck. It hung in a show the painters put on themselves after the official one kept turning them down.

Views across the water like this were a whole genre in Holland at the time — a way of showing off a town and the trade money running through it, according to Wikipedia. This is apparently the only cityscape he ever bothered with; nearly everything else of his is one or two people in a room.

Ports were his element — he sailed properly, owned a run of boats and painted his way round the Mediterranean coast. The dots were a theory at the time, as I understand it: set pure colours next to each other and let your eye do the mixing instead of muddying them on the palette.