Paul Signac – The Poetry of The Bonaventure Pine

“I hear you call, pine tree, I hear you upon the hill, by the silent pondwhere the lotus flowers bloom, I hear you call, pine tree.What is it you call, pine tree, when the rain falls, when the windsblow, and when the stars appear, what is it you call, pine tree?I hear you call, pine tree, but I am blind, and do not know how toreach you, pine tree. Who will take me to you, pine tree?”

(Yone Noguchi, I Hear You Call, Pine Tree)

Paul Signac, The Bonaventure Pine (Op 239), 1893

Paul Signac’s painting “The Bonaventure Pine”, painted in 1893, isn’t just a painting of a pine tree by the beach, but as a symphony of colour and light, fractured into tiny prisms and reassembled into radiance. It is not a pine alone that we behold, but a pine refracted through the dream of Pointillism. Every leaf and every needle are a unique vibration, every shade is a note in the vast visual score. The tree itself is standing solitary, bent slightly by the winds from the sea. He is the guardian of the coast. Its silhouette is firm, rooted in earth, but its body dissolves into shimmering particles of blue, violet, and green. Signac doesn’t also paint the pine as it is in its physical form, but the pine as it feels. Signac captures the quiver of its branches against the salty air, the breath of the Mediterranean sea that moves unseen yet visible in colour. The pine painted here with that wide umbrella-like treetop is the umbrella pine, known also under various other names such as the Mediterranean pine, or the Italian stone pine or, in Latin, Pinus pinea, or simply Mediterranean pine. I never fancied pine trees before as much until I see this one and it does just scream Mediterranean and I love it!

Signac, like many other painters before and after him, found himself irresistibly drawn to light and warmth of the south and in 1892 he moved to Saint-Tropez in the south of France. This is connected to the painting’s title. Namely, the “Bonaventure” part of the title comes from the tree’s location. This pine was on the property of a certain Monsieur Bonaventure.

In this painting, nature becomes both eternal and ephemeral. The pine tree is sturdy, ancient, a witness to all the centuries that have gone by. And yet Signac’s brush, patient, meticulous, scattering dots like dandelion seeds, renders it alive in a single fleeting hour of sunlight. The mood of this work hovers between permanence and evanescence: the rooted strength of the tree, the ever-changing light of day. There is also a sense of poetic solitude here. The pine rises alone, its form exaggerated against the vastness of the sky and the sea. It is at once proud and vulnerable, much like the human spirit when it confronts the infinite. The painting whispers of resilience: the pine bends but does not break; it endures storms, yet in Signac’s vision it glows with inner fire, inner passion which is dark but irresistible.

Pointillism, in this context, becomes a metaphor for life itself: built from countless small moments, fragile as dots of paint, yet together forming a whole that is luminous, unshakable, and profound. Signac’s pine is not just a tree on a coast; it is the endurance of beauty, the steadfastness of being, the poetry of standing alone and yet belonging to the world.