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Albert Marquet

French, 1875 - 1947

BiographyBorn Bordeaux, 26 March 1875; died Paris, 14 June 1947.

French painter and draughtsman. In 1890 he was taken by his family to live in Paris so that he could study drawing at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs. There he met Henri Matisse, with whom he formed a lasting friendship and with whom he studied from 1894 to 1898 at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under Gustave Moreau. In the Louvre, Marquet made copies after Poussin, Velázquez, Claude Lorrain and particularly Chardin, of whose House of Cards he produced copies in 1894 and 1904 (Montmédy, Mus. Bastien-Lepage, holds what is considered the later of the two).

Tentative early works by Marquet such as Portrait of the Artist’s Mother (1894; San Francisco, priv. col., see 1988 exh. cat., no. 1), suggesting the influence of Fantin-Latour, were soon succeeded by landscape paintings such as Parisian Suburb (1897; Besançon, Mus. B.-A. & Archéol.), in which he began to simplify the subject into broad areas of colour. Nude, sometimes known as Fauve Nude (1898; Bordeaux, Mus. B.-A.), painted in Matisse’s company shortly before they left Moreau’s studio, was one of the earliest works in which he used separate brushstrokes of vivid colour, prefiguring the style that was later to be called Fauvism.

Marquet found it difficult at first to sell his works, but in 1900 he was hired with Matisse to paint the Art Nouveau ornaments of the Grand Palais for the Exposition Universelle. In 1901 he participated in the Salon des Indépendants and produced his first painting of the Apse of Notre-Dame de Paris (Besançon, Mus. B.-A. & Archéol.), announcing his habit of using the banks of the Seine as subject-matter. To this he soon added a preference for broader and more colourful brushwork.

Marquet exhibited at Berthe Weill and the Galerie Druet, Paris, from 1902, and from 1903 at the Salon d’Automne. At the Salon of 1904 he made his first sale to the state, the Trees at Billancourt (c. 1898; Bordeaux, Mus. B.-A.), and in the Salon of 1905, which marked the emergence of Fauvism, his own relation to the movement began to be defined. Although his technique and use of colour were less violent than those of such artists as Vlaminck or Derain, in 1906 he produced some of his best and most characteristic Fauve paintings, for example 14th of July at Le Havre (Bagnols-sur-Cèze, Mus. Bagnols-sur-Cèze), Posters at Trouville (Mr & Mrs J. H. Whitney priv. col., see 1975 exh. cat., p. 39) and the Beach at Fécamp (Paris, Mus. d’Orsay). It was during this period also that, under the influence of Japanese brush paintings, he devised a remarkably animated and spontaneous form of India ink drawing, for example in Dancing Couple (1904), one of the group of figure drawings now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux.

Subsequently, Marquet worked in more tonally quiet colours, but with the yellows, greens and greys expressing the nuances of light on water, his favourite subject, as in Pont Saint-Michel and the Quai des Grands-Augustins (1910–11; Paris, Pompidou). In Paris he almost always lived on the quais of the Seine, from which he was able to paint the river. He also travelled constantly, visiting all the coasts of France and spending time in England, the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, Italy, Spain, Egypt and the USSR. These trips are recorded in a number of paintings in which he responded to the light and atmospheric conditions characteristic of each place, as in the Port of Hamburg (1909; Hamburg, Ksthalle). After his first stay in Algiers in 1920, where he met Marcelle Martinet, whom he married in 1923, he spent several successive winters in North Africa; one of his most decorative and luminous pictures, the Window at La Goulette (1926; Bordeaux, Mus. B.-A.), was painted in Tunisia during one such visit.

Marquet was timid and discreet as a person, perhaps because of his near-sightedness and a limp, and he shied away from any official honours. Nevertheless his late paintings, such as the Pont Neuf at Night (1935–9; Paris, Pompidou) and View of Algiers (1939; Bordeaux, Mus. B.-A.), continued to testify to the acuteness of his observation and freshness of vision.

Jean Selz. "Marquet, Albert." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T054550 (accessed March 6, 2012).

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