Sunday

A bourgeois couple passes a dull Sunday shut indoors, the man standing with his back to us staring out the window, the woman idly poking the fire, the stiff, airless room rendered entirely in fine dots of color. Paul Signac uses the Pointillist method to capture not light and pleasure but tedium - the stilted poses and rigid furnishings conveying the boredom of comfortable domestic life. Now in a private collection, Sunday is a wry, quietly critical picture, the scientific dot technique turned to the depiction of bourgeois ennui and the long, empty hours of a day of rest.