Marseilles Harbour with a Lighthouse

Antoine Vollon's Marseilles Harbour with a Lighthouse (1887) is a marine subject by the Paris-based still-life and marine painter, showing his capacity to move between genres with equal technical command. Vollon was celebrated for the richness of his paint surface and his ability to render light on complex textures, and marine subjects — with their combinations of water light, sky, and architectural forms — offered ideal testing grounds for these skills. The lighthouse at Marseilles, one of France's great Mediterranean ports, gave the composition a strong architectural focal point. The work is held in the National Gallery of Ireland.

The painting organizes the harbor scene around the vertical emphasis of the lighthouse against the open Mediterranean sky. Vollon's paint handling is characteristically robust, with the water rendered in broken, active strokes and the architectural forms more solidly painted. The palette is bright with Mediterranean light.