Albert Marquet

Albert Marquet was born in Bordeaux, moved to Paris in 1890 and enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts. He studied under the Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau, together with his later Fauvist friends Henri Matisse, Henri Manguin and Charles Camoin. After a difficult start, around 1905 his painting sales picked up, thanks to the energetic art dealer Eugène Druet, who also organised Marquet’s first solo exhibition in 1907. Marquet gave himself over to his three great passions, water, travel and painting: he ceaselessly visited the ports of Europe and North Africa — Boulogne, Saint-Tropez, Marseille, Hamburg, Stockholm, Venice, Rotterdam, Naples, Algiers, Tunis — depicting each with a peculiar modernism mixed with realism. “I cannot write or speak, only paint and draw,” he once said. “Look at my work. Either I have succeeded in expressing myself or I have failed. If you do not understand my pictures, I can do no more.”

From the page of 14 July in Le Havre