#pointillism

Took him something like two years, from what I can find — a pile of small studies done out at the park, then the big one built up indoors. The speckled border round the edge is his as well; he added it later so the thing wouldn't have to sit inside somebody else's gold frame.

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.

The title comes from a line in a Baudelaire poem, apparently — luxury, calm, pleasure. He'd spent a summer down on the Mediterranean coast with a painter who worked entirely in separate little dots, and it looks like he tried the method on for size here before heading off somewhere else with it.

The tower was brand new when this was painted, and a good chunk of Paris couldn't stand it — a few hundred writers and architects signed an open letter calling it a monstrosity, and the whole thing was only meant to stand about twenty years. Worth knowing this is a tiny painting too, roughly the size of a sheet of paper, according to what I could find.

From what I could find, this dot-by-dot way of painting came over from France, and he was one of the few Dutch painters who really committed to it. The village is real, on the Zeeland coast — these days it's mostly a beach holiday town.

That's the same island from the enormous Sunday-crowd picture everyone knows — he kept going back to it. The dots supposedly weren't just a look: he'd been reading up on how colours mix in your eye instead of on the palette, and a handful of other painters ran with the idea until it was a whole movement with a name.