The seascape genre is a constant theme in the figurative work of Albert Marquet, addressed both in its French variants and during countless travels throughout his life from the coasts of northern Europe to the countries of North Africa. 

Marquet’s intense period of study as a pupil of the Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris as from 1895 included relations and exchanges of ideas with enterprising fellow students such as Henri Matisse, with whom he established a deep and lasting friendship, Georges Rouault, Henri Evenepoel, Jules Flandrin, Charles Camoin and Henri-Charles Manguin, with whom he shared experiences of importance to his artistic training. 

Attracted by Impressionist painting en plein air, certainly filtered in his case through Cézanne’s approach to landscape and the Japanese figurative models that had been circulating in the French capital for years, Marquet found it somewhat difficult to gain acceptance for his work at the turn of the century, not least because of his unassuming and introverted character. He did not in fact show any work in public until the Salon of 1899. 

Paysage du Midi (Landscape in the South of France) is one of a group of works painted by Marquet in the summer of 1905, all characterised by a marked degree of figurative synthesis and chromatic simplification developed through the deft distribution of planes. Having signed an exclusive contract with the Parisian gallery Druet, founded in 1903 by the photographer Eugène Druet in Faubourg Saint- Honoré, in the spring that put an end to the financial difficulties that had long haunted him, he set off in May for the South of France in response to an invitation from his friend Manguin, who had been in the seaside town of Saint Tropez for some time. 

The painting shows the sun-drenched bay in front of Agay, a small port in the Var department, dominated by the rosy shape of the Esterel massif, where Marquet and Camoin, who was also on holiday in the south, had been invited after the first week in July by the painters Henri-Edmond Cross and Louis Valtat. The weather on their arrival in the South of France had made painting impossible but it had now cleared up and Marquet stayed for a few days at the Grand Hôtel d’Agay, setting up his easel on the shores of the bay or on the headlands around the harbour, before going on alone to visit Nice and Menton. 

The other landscapes painted by Marquet in Agay are closely related to the work discussed here, above all as regards the chosen viewpoint and focus on the same areas of territory.¹ 

The painting entered the collection in the late 1990s, a period when Francesco Federico Cerruti, who had purchased a house in Mentone, was a regular visitor to the south of France. 

Alessandro Botta 

¹ See in particular the Vue d’Agay (1905, Le Havre, Musée d’Art Moderne André Malraux) and Vue d’Agay (1905, Paris, Centre Pompidou).