I’m afraid I can’t find out where this painting is, nor how big it is. But I do know that I’m a great admirer of Marquet’s work and feel it deserves more recognition.
Albert Marquet was a lifelong friend of Matisse – the two met as young art students in Paris in the 1890s and showed their early works together at the Salon d’Automne in 1905, the infamous exhibition that prompted an art critic to label them as Fauves, or wild animals, most particularly for their use of excessively bright, unnatural colour. The first radical art movement of the 20th century was created, in other words, not by the artists themselves but in the media.
This isn’t a particularly feral painting, though admittedly it’s a later work made when Marquet had refined his own métier as a painter of cityscapes. Both he and Matisse lived in small apartments in a building on the left bank, the Quai St Michel, overlooking Notre Dame. Matisse painted this view a few times himself and his paintings are much more overtly avant-garde.
Where Marquet excels in his mastery of tone, or more precisely in deftly manipulated tonal differences. Here it’s seen in the way he’s deployed small dabs of darker paint: the two foreground figures, the lamppost, and more gently on the bouquiniste’s stalls lining the embankment, clearly assert themselves against broader sweeps of subtly brightening colour. Behind them the cathedral rises in the morning light; the more distant bridges and rooves remain indistinct as greys morph into pale blue to meet the yellowing sky. Is it early spring, a chill, still start to a warming, bustling day? Whatever the case I suspect there’s quite a lot he’s left out. One of Marquet’s other gifts was to eradicate the inessential.
One last thing to note on the bouquinistes that line the banks of the Seine. How wonderful that Paris should give such prominence to reading right in the heart of the city. We have some occasional bookstalls under Waterloo Bridge but they’re not quite the same. Not far from the view seen here were the premises of the publishers Shakespeare and Co. who produced Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922, the same year Marquet painted this view. What a dawn that was.
