Jeanne Selmersheim-Desgrange

1877-1958

Jeanne Selmersheim-Desgrange is renowned for her relationship with Paul Signac. The pair met in Paris in the 1890s and Jeanne became his pupil and later his mistress. Through this relationship Selmersheim-Desgrange embraced the Neo-Impressionist pointillist style which Signac had developed alongside Paul Seurat.

Jeanne Selmersheim-Desgrange was born in 1877 into a family in which the women had been artists and costume designers, the men architects and draftsmen. She began in the decorative arts herself then, after her marriage to Selmersheim came to an end, Jeanne retained the name.

Jeanne met Paul Signac and became his life partner. Although she had had considerable training already, it was Signac who became her teacher, and her art is very close to his. She exhibited regularly at the Paris Salon des Indépendants beginning in 1909.

To fully understand the period in which Jeanne Selmersheim-Desgrange lived, one must have known and loved the area around St. Tropez – the relaxed atmosphere, the intense light, the brilliant earthen colours, dark tree silhouettes and the azure seas. All life was conditioned around the sea, the beautiful Mediterranean.

Signac, as much a sailor as a painter, while cruising off the coast of Southern France in 1892, discovered St. Tropez and installed himself and his mistress, Jeanne Selmersheim-Desgrange in a small house there called La Hune, to which they always returned, and which was always home to them.

The union of Jeanne and Paul Signac brought together two sensitive artists. They never married but of this union, Paul Signac’s only child, Ginette, was born. She also followed the tallented path of her parents.

Jeanne's watercolours and oil paintings are full of many rare and delicate colours, orange, yellow, rose, light blue and green. These gave her works a unique glistening opalescent nuances. All her work suggests a melancholy and tenderness which is filled with lyrical expression.

Jeanne was happy and most contented to stay in the shadows of Paul Signac, she was of a very loving and considerate nature, and did not wish to take advantage of his great name.

She died in 1958 at “La Hune” a house filled with the memories of this significant period in art.

Her work was included in the exhibition entitled Neo-Impressionism at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1968.