Harbour scenery painted from an elevated position as a view from a window. In the foreground are a quay and a long building with red saddle roof, entering the composition diagonally from the lower right corner. Exactly in the centre of the composition is a tiny figure in a boat, not too far from a larger two-mast ship. In the middle distance in a bow-shaped jetty with numerous ships anchored along its right side. Signed at lower left "marquet".
Throughout his life Marquet travelled extensively in Europe and North Africa, delighting in visiting places where he was unknown and enjoying the sense of freedom this brought him. From 1910 water - particularly rivers and ports - was a major source of inspiration for him. He painted harbour scenes in Marseille, Paris, Hamburg, Stockholm, Rotterdam and Algiers, the subject in each essentially the same but transformed by differences in climate, national character and weather conditions - for, haze, mist, rain, sunshine.
Of all these ports it was Algiers that had a special meaning for him. During his first visit in 1920, to recover from flu, the retiring artist met his future wife, and from then on their winters would be spent in Algeria. Preferring to paint from a window, working undisturbed by human contact, Marquet created works that often have, as here, a high viewpoint. This view, painted from the Boulevard Anatole-France, looks out over the port with its administrative buildings and the crescent-shaped north jetty marking the entrance to the commercial port for medium tonnage vessels and mail ships.
For an artist with a love of order and clarity, the jetties, ships and warehouses provided him with a ready-made orderly compositions with the horizontal lines of the roofs and quayside set against the verticals of masts and derricks. The artist's task, to translate a three-dimensional view onto a flat canvas, is made more difficult by his choice of viewpoint, as the high horizon line flattens the picture space. Like Dufy, Marquet reduces the scene to its essentials with great economy and expressiveness of line, and this, combined with the calm and quiet of the seemingly sleeping port, gives this painting a serenity, a silent poetry.
Marquet loved to observe and paint light on water. Constantly reflecting the changing mood of the sky, it is the water that unites the various areas of the composition. He suggests a slight breeze with the hasty zigzag reflections of the yacht's masts and funnel and by the slightly deeper shade of blue in the foreground. Marque's remarkable sensitivity to colour - he preferred cool colours - allows him to capture nuances of light and subtleties of atmosphere in the most figurative moments.
As art critic François Daulte so tellingly wrote, Marquet may not have had the invention of Picasso, the decorative skills of a Matisse, the mood of a Roault or the tragedy of a Utrillo. His originality lay in his ability to go straight to the essentials of a scene - a subtle mix of poetry and truth.
Credit: Presented by the Trustees of the Hamilton Bequest, 1955