Albert Marquet
Fauve for a season, then fifty years of quiet grey harbours seen from an upstairs window.
Albert Marquet was born at Bordeaux in 1875 and met Matisse as a student at the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs; the two were close for life and shared the Fauve moment of 1905. Marquet left the wild colour behind almost immediately and spent the following half-century painting water — the Seine from his apartment windows, the ports of Normandy, Algiers, Naples, Stockholm — in a narrow, subtle range of greys, greens and blues, with figures reduced to a few decisive marks. Matisse called him the Hokusai of France. He worked in Algiers during the war years and died in Paris in 1947.
The Fauve pictures of 1905 to 1907 are scarce and are far ahead of everything else. The port and river views form the substantial body of the market and are valued by location, date and the quality of the light rather than by size alone. Marquet is a well-catalogued artist and the Wildenstein Plattner Institute holds the catalogue raisonne project. Drawings in ink and watercolour are numerous and frequently very fine. Forgeries of the harbour views exist in quantity and are the main attribution risk.
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