Le Port de la Ponche, Saint-Tropez

Marquet visited Saint-Tropez in 1905, the same year that Matisse and Derain were transforming the town's harbour into the proving ground for Fauvism. This canvas, showing the Ponche port — the old fishing harbour tucked behind the main quay — captures a moment when Marquet's style was closest to his Fauve companions while remaining distinctly his own. Where Matisse used Saint-Tropez light to justify the most radical chromatic inventions, Marquet responded to the same Mediterranean luminosity with more measured, almost poetic simplicity. The Ponche harbour is tighter and more intimate than the main port, and Marquet's composition reflects this: the scene is compressed, with boats and buildings pressed together in a shallow pictorial space. Now in the MuMa collection in Le Havre, the painting belongs to an important moment in French art when the south of France became simultaneously a retreat from Paris and an arena of pictorial experiment.

The 1905 date places this work within Marquet's most saturated period, and colour is deployed with greater warmth than in later, cooler harbour views. Brushwork is visible and energetic, though more contained than Matisse's work of the same year. The composition uses the harbour's enclosed geometry to organise the pictorial field.