Capo di Noli, near Genoa

Capo di Noli, near Genoa is an oil-on-canvas painting by Paul Signac from 1898, on permanent loan from the Fondation Corboud to the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne. It measures 93.5 by 75 cm and shows a headland at Noli on the Italian Riviera, west of Genoa.

Signac lived in Saint-Tropez from 1892 to 1900. In the summer of 1896 he hiked from there to Noli, and he painted this view of the cape two years later. He said of the picture that he wanted to take every corner of the canvas to the absolute extreme in terms of colour. By then he was the leading figure of Neo-Impressionism: he had met Georges Seurat in 1884, when both were among the founders of the Société des Artistes Indépendants, adopted his method of placing pure colours in small dots or strokes according to theories of complementary contrast, and took over as head of the group after Seurat's death in 1891.

The Cologne museum stresses that the composition was worked out with great care in the studio before it was painted. Signac varied the direction of his touches to fit each element: vertical marks for the pink and white cliffs on the left and for the pines on the right, horizontal ones for the calm sea and the path where two figures walk, and in the sky tiny dots near the horizon giving way to crossed diagonal strokes higher up. Blue shadows and touches of gold set off the warm rock. Seen from a distance, the mosaic of separate colours is meant to combine in the eye.

For the museum the real subject is the colour itself rather than an impression of nature, and the work shows how far Signac had moved from the Impressionists. This non-naturalistic use of pure colour had a lasting influence on painters of the early twentieth century, both the Fauves in France and the Expressionists in Germany, and Signac himself opened the Salon des Indépendants to the Fauves and the Cubists.