Pointillism In Paul Signac's The Bonaventure Pine

The Bonaventure Pine currently resides in the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas (Google Art Project). The painting was gifted to the museum by Audrey Jones Beck, but was originally painted by French painter Paul Signac using oil on canvas (Google Art Project). The painting simply shows a big pine tree sitting on top of hill in front of a lake. We don’t know where this place is but considering that most post-impressionist painters lived in Paris, France, we can assume that it is a scene by a Paris lake. The post-impressionist movement took place in the late 19th century and it put more focus on not just the scene taking place, but the qualities of line, patter, and other art elements and how they brought feeling to a painting (Kleiner 852). By using a post-impressionist style called pointillism Signac was able to blend his colors in order to make the tree, sky, and lake morph together while still being easily distinguishable from one another.

The way the individual pines on the Pine Tree are painted make it look like it is a calm day because they aren’t in a position that indicates that there is any wind blowing. The tree is very large though and is in the shape of an almost perfect umbrella with a few outlying branches. The calmness of the tree and apparent calmness of the wind give the painting a very relaxed feeling. The fact that no one is standing around or walking around the tree adds to the effect of this painting being relaxed as there is nothing major happening. In the background on the lake there are 2 sailboats that seem to be standing perfectly upright, even the water sits calm indicating again that this is a windless day. It is only possible to see a small section of the lake though as the rest of it expands both past the foreground hill, and back into the hills all the way in the back of the