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Lot Essay
This work will be included in the forthcoming volume of the catalogue critique of Albert Marquet’s paintings being prepared by the Wildenstein Institute.
Marquet rented a house with his wife, Marcelle, in the picturesque village of Triel, Seine-et-Oise in the summer of 1931. Located on the banks of the Seine, 35 kilometers outside of Paris, Triel offered the artist an opportunity to spend his days observing the boats which populated the river. In the present work, a barge shares the water with sailboats large and small, containing both boaters of leisure and fisherman at work. All of the boats exist in harmony together on the sun-drenched passage of the river. Here Marquet expertly captures the play of light on the water with contrasting shades of grey and white interspersed with short strokes of blues.
The series of landscapes painted that summer at Triel—one of which, The Seine at Triel, 1931 is at The Art Institute of Chicago—create an invitation to voyage and drift along the leisurely flow of the river. These views are characterized by their vast skies, their soft, calm horizon lines, and Impressionistic handling. As his friend and contemporary, Marcel Sembat, has remarked, “No artist has the same relationship with light as Marquet. It is as if he owned it. He possesses the secret of a pure and intense light which fills all the sky with its uniform and colorless glow. Above the mud, the stagnant waters, the glistening stones, the smoke of railroad stations, an immense sky stretches with no blue, no azure, but how luminous! Luminous as daylight itself and so transparent that a painting by Marquet gives the impression of a large window being opened onto the outside” (quoted in Marquet, exh. cat., Le Plessis, 1985, p. 6).
(fig. 1) The artist working in his garden.
Marquet rented a house with his wife, Marcelle, in the picturesque village of Triel, Seine-et-Oise in the summer of 1931. Located on the banks of the Seine, 35 kilometers outside of Paris, Triel offered the artist an opportunity to spend his days observing the boats which populated the river. In the present work, a barge shares the water with sailboats large and small, containing both boaters of leisure and fisherman at work. All of the boats exist in harmony together on the sun-drenched passage of the river. Here Marquet expertly captures the play of light on the water with contrasting shades of grey and white interspersed with short strokes of blues.
The series of landscapes painted that summer at Triel—one of which, The Seine at Triel, 1931 is at The Art Institute of Chicago—create an invitation to voyage and drift along the leisurely flow of the river. These views are characterized by their vast skies, their soft, calm horizon lines, and Impressionistic handling. As his friend and contemporary, Marcel Sembat, has remarked, “No artist has the same relationship with light as Marquet. It is as if he owned it. He possesses the secret of a pure and intense light which fills all the sky with its uniform and colorless glow. Above the mud, the stagnant waters, the glistening stones, the smoke of railroad stations, an immense sky stretches with no blue, no azure, but how luminous! Luminous as daylight itself and so transparent that a painting by Marquet gives the impression of a large window being opened onto the outside” (quoted in Marquet, exh. cat., Le Plessis, 1985, p. 6).
(fig. 1) The artist working in his garden.