Le Port de Rabat

Albert Marquet's North African subjects began in the 1920s when he started making extended visits to Morocco and Algeria, drawn by the quality of Mediterranean light and by the architectural and social world of the Maghreb. His 1935 canvas depicting the port of Rabat, now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Mulhouse, belongs to a sustained engagement with Morocco's Atlantic capital that produced some of his most purely tonal work. Rabat's port on the Bou Regreg estuary offered a composition quite different from his Paris or Marseille harbour scenes: the scale was human rather than industrial, the light intensely clear, the architecture a mixture of Moorish and colonial forms. Marquet treated these North African subjects with the same economy he applied to Paris — broad, simplified passages of colour, minimal detail, an emphasis on the unifying quality of strong Mediterranean light. The Mulhouse museum, with its focus on French modernism, holds this canvas as evidence of how French painters of Marquet's generation understood North African subjects not as exoticist spectacle but as straightforward pictorial opportunities for the investigation of light and space.

The strong Atlantic light of Rabat produces a high-key palette with pale ochre and white for buildings, deep blue for the estuary, and a clear, almost bleached sky. Marquet simplifies architectural forms to flat colour areas with minimal internal modelling, reflecting the way strong overhead light flattens vertical surfaces and eliminates half-tones.