The Evening Air (L'Air du soir)

c. 1893

Oil on canvas, 116 × 166 cm. Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Women rest and stroll under pines by the sea as the heat of the day fades. Matisse saw it hanging in Signac's dining room and drew on it for an early key work.

The small dot grows into broad, rectangular strokes that read like mosaic tiles. Enlarging the touch gave the method a decorative force suited to a big wall-sized canvas.
It answered Signac's 1893 idea that each paint a big decorative canvas praising the South.
Its first showing came in 1894, at the group's third joint exhibition.
Level and upright lines offset each other, and the figures hold still in easy poses.
Ginette Signac donated it to the French national collections in 1976.

The setting is the South of France, where the painter had lived for two years. The classical grouping of figures in an ideal landscape draws on Puvis de Chavannes's Sweet Land.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · PD-Art