Le bac à Rolleboise

Albert Marquet's 1947 depiction of a ferry crossing at Rolleboise — the Seine village west of Paris where he had a house — represents one of his final works before his death in Paris that same year. The simple subject of a flat-bottomed ferry crossing a rural reach of the Seine, with its implicit evocation of passage and threshold, takes on retrospective significance as a late-life work. Rolleboise gave Marquet the quieter, more rural Seine he could not access from his Paris apartment, with its slower pace, farmland banks, and absence of urban industrial presence. The ferry itself — a simple working vessel rather than anything picturesque — is exactly the kind of subject Marquet consistently chose: working river infrastructure without historical or cultural elaboration, seen directly and recorded with economy. The undated status in institutional collections suggests this work passed through the estate and the private market before settling in current hands.

The flat-bottomed ferry provides a simple dark horizontal form on the river surface, described in broad strokes of warm brown and black. The surrounding Seine is rendered in open, horizontal tonal passages with the far bank simplified to a low, continuous dark band. Late-career Marquet's handling is supremely economical — each element described in the minimum of strokes consistent with legibility.