Biographies

Albert Marquet (1875 – 1947) He was born in Bordeax, but his family came to Paris in 1890. He began to study at the Ecole des arts-décoratifs, where he met . Then they both moved to the workshop of . Together, they developed a style of painting that came to be known as that of “fauves” or wild beasts, though Marquet, in particular, was never very wild. But he did show his work at the famous Salon d’Automne of 1905 with the other fauves. In later years he travelled widely and continued to paint, but his work during the fauve period is the best known. In for November 24, 1910 , in a review of the famous Post-Impressionist show at the Grafton Gallery, George Calderon praised “Marquet’s ‘Sands at Havre,’ with all the racket and bunting of a real holiday at the seaside, and his grim grey ‘Notre Dame,’ a tragic rendering of the rocky loneliness of a great cathedral in a city . . . . Then go forth and pass along the streets about and note how flat, stale and unprofitable have become all those engravings, pictures and statues in the art dealers’ windows, that represent the bare photographic semblance of reality, with dramatic meanings laid on it, not drawn out from it.” We are not certain we have found the right Havre image, but we have the right image of Marquet’s painting of Notre Dame. Matisse Gustave Moreau The New Age (NA 8.4:90)