Albert Marquet didn’t like people watching him paint, he felt embarrassed.
That’s why three-quarters of his paintings are plunging views because he would paint from the balcony of his hotel or villa he had rented, or even his apartment, Quai des Grands Augustins. At least on a balcony he had some peace; no-one could look over his shoulder and comment on his work. The Garden, Pyla was no exception to the rule. Marquet had a dominating view down over the landscape.
The remarkable thing is how Marquet always managed to draw his subjects as if he was sketching with his paintbrush. As a young man, along with his friend Henri Matisse, they would sit on the terrace of a café and have competitions to see who could sketch the quickest, using passers-by and peddlers as their models. This speed of execution can be seen in this canvas. If you move in closer, you’ll see that the bathers, the woman from behind, or the boats in the distance, are barely sketched at all. As if Marquet was sticking to the essential which is the key to his talent, compared to other more fastidious artists who reassure themselves by getting lost in superfluous detail. And then last of all, he had this taste for colour, shadows, light. And sometimes we ask ourselves if Marquet had painted the sea first then added the trees, or the other way round. And looking even closer, you notice that he painted the vegetation first and then filled in the empty spaces with the blue of the sea after.
Albert Marquet was really not a conventional artist.
