“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…”
Throughout his life, Albert Marquet was drawn to the port scenes and seascapes of Europe and the Mediterranean. Le Port de Vigo, Espagne, is exemplary of Marquet’s remarkable ability to capture and portray light. Presented from a raised vantage point, the bright haze of the sun, penetrating through the clouds, illuminates the trees in the foreground, their exuberant green tones reverberating through the more muted palette of the sea and land behind. These areas, executed in flatter more economically rendered planes, reflect the artist’s early Fauve period. In his description of Marquet's fascination with seaports, François Daulte notes that the artist had ‘an incomparable instinct...to reduce a landscape to its essential factors, separating the horizontal lines from the vertical. These lines he used to depict perspective, and to convey dimension. He always considered that the representation of space remained the principal element in the composition of a painting’ (Marquet (exhibition catalogue), Knoedler Gallery, New York, 1964, pp. 4 & 5).