The Port of Algiers

Marquet painted the port of Algiers many times, coming back to it the way people return to a window they cannot stop looking out of. Through the 1920s and 30s Algiers was the busiest harbour of French North Africa, a working Mediterranean port with cargo boats, ferries and fishing craft crossing it all day, and he liked to take a room above the water and paint what passed below. In these harbour pictures he almost always looks down from a balcony or an upper window, so the quay tilts up and the sea fills most of the canvas. The colour is kept deliberately low, greys and soft blues with a few darker marks standing in for hulls and masts. He came back to this same water in every kind of weather, working the paint thin and fast, so a whole working harbour settles into a few flat bands of grey sea, pale sky and stone quay.