Roses et Arrosoirs, Saint-Tropez is precisely the kind of painting that reveals why Jeanne Selmersheim-Desgrange (1877–1958) deserves to be far better known than she is. Roses in a garden, watering cans catching the light — modest subjects, treated with a technical and chromatic intelligence that makes them anything but modest. Selmersheim-Desgrange came from a family of artists and architects, and trained first in the decorative arts before her encounter with Paul Signac transformed her practice entirely. Signac — the great theorist of Neo-Impressionism and the movement's most committed champion after Seurat — became her teacher and later her companion. Under his influence she mastered Divisionism: colour applied in precise, broken strokes that merge in the eye into something luminous and vibrating with life. Saint-Tropez was central to both their lives. Signac had discovered it by boat in 1892 and it became the spiritual home of French Neo-Impressionism — its harbour, gardens, terraces and fierce Mediterranean light the backdrop to some of the most celebrated paintings of the movement. Selmersheim-Desgrange absorbed all of it. The particular quality of colour in this painting — the warmth of the roses against the cool air, the way light falls across the watering cans — is inseparable from that landscape and that light. She exhibited regularly at the Salon des Indépendants from 1909, and her work has been shown across France, Belgium, the United States and Saint-Tropez itself.