Porquerolles

Executed in 1939, the year the Second World War began, this view of Porquerolles — the largest of the Îles d'Hyères off the Provençal coast — belongs to the last chapter of Marquet's career. He continued working with great focus through the 1930s and into the war years, and his island and coastal subjects from this period carry an intensified quietude, as if the painter were pressing against the violence of contemporary events with scenes of elemental calm. Porquerolles, a relatively unspoilt island whose pine forests meet a clear turquoise sea, gave Marquet a subject naturally resistant to the industrial modernity that animated his harbour paintings. Now in the Van Vlissingen Art Foundation, the work reflects his lifelong conviction that a landscape reduced to its essential pictorial structure could sustain the viewer's attention without narrative or incident. The island's distinctive profile and the colour of its waters are rendered with the spare confidence of a painter at the height of his craft.

Marquet's late style is characterised by even greater tonal economy. Colour areas are broad and cleanly separated, with the Mediterranean blue-green of the water carrying the chromatic weight of the composition. The paint surface is likely thin and smooth, the brushwork invisible in the broader passages.