Were it not for Paul Signac, Neo-Impressionism might have lost all momentum following the early death of Seurat in 1891. Signac inherited the Divisionist banner and lobbied tirelessly on its behalf. It was Signac who introduced Seurat's system of color harmony to the vanguard critics and writers who would champion it, and it was he who published the influential treatise D'Eugène Delacroix au Néo-Impressionisme (1899), an argument for Neo-Impressionism as the logical and legitimate successor to Impressionism. In Signac's own work, the rigor and restraint of his early paintings (1975.1.209) gave way to a bold and luxuriant palette in later years (Grand Canal, Venice). His marine watercolors (1975.1.718), in particular, enabled him to explore the purity and clarity of color, with no more than a pencil and a box of watercolors in his itinerant pocket.
If Neo-Impressionism ultimately marked only a brief passage from the plein-air painting of Impressionism in the nineteenth century to radiant Fauvism and the geometry of Cubism in the twentieth, it codified a language essential to modernism and brought with it a new text of independent form and color.