Berge Triel (Le Remorqueur)

Marcel Sembat, a friend and contemporary of Marquet and an avid collector who once vehemently defended cubism in a speech given to the Parliamentary Assembly after the scandalous Salon d'Automne of 1912, recalled the artist: 'No artist has the same relationship with light as Marquet. It is as if he owned it. He possesses the secret of a pure and intense light which fills all the sky with its uniform and colourless glow. Above the mud, the stagnant waters, the glistening stones, the smoke of railroad stations, an immense sky stretches with no blue, no azure, but how luminous! Luminous as daylight itself and so transparent that a painting by Marquet gives the impression of a large window being opened onto the outside...' (quoted in the exh. cat., Marquet, Le Plessis, 1985, p. 6).

Marquet returned to the village of Triel in the summer of 1931, the year of the present work. 'Avec leur ciel vaste, leur horizon aux lignes douces et calmes, leur manires impressionniste, les toiles de Triel se composent selon un ordre presque invariable. Souvent les voiliers y glissant au fil de l'eau et le mouvement des pniches s'harmonise avec le paysage. Tout se lie, se pntre, s'enchane. Les canots qui s'en vont sont comme une suite sans fin, une continuelle invitation au voyage' (exh. cat., Albert Marquet, Lausanne, 1988).

The Wildenstein Institute will include this painting in their forthcoming Marquet catalogue raisonn.