Albert Marquet exhibited from the outset with the Fauves, and painted with his life-long friend Matisse in Collioure, L’Estaque, Marseilles and later in Tangiers. Landscape was of primary importance to the Fauves while it became virtually Marquet’s only genre. Marquet has been described as ‘an independent Fauve’. His landscapes being less violently coloured than his comrade’s, are at once synthetic and naturalistic, bathed in soft Mediterranean light. In describing his unique ability to convey atmosphere, Nathalie Brodskaïa has observed that, ‘It is really the case that of the generation born in the 1870s, he was the only one who understood and empathized with the Impressionists, although he himself did not take that course.[…] Marquet’s work is saturated for the same purpose: to create an impression of an integrity of light which for him was more important than colour itself. […] In the accomplishment of the task which Manguin held to be the main one for the Fauves – the intensification of light in painting – it was Marquet who probably played the main role.’ (N. Brodskaïa, The Fauves, New York, 2012, p. 113).

Marquet alternated between working in his studio in Paris and the Mediterranean coast. In 1920, on one of his first trips to North Africa, the artist met Marcelle Martinet, a French woman who grew up and lived in Algeria and who helped him to experience the life of the Arabic world. The couple married three years later. Afterwards, they would spend their winters in Marcelle's homeland and were at home in both Paris and Algiers. These stays in Algeria were very influential for the artist and strongly informed his painting.
Impressed by the charm of the Orient, amazed by the Arabic-moor’s architecture and the Mediterranean vegetation at the French colonies, he spent considerable time at Algeria, throughout the period 1923-1945. The port and the city of Algiers from its heights are among the most developed themes of his art from then.

La Square au drapeaux impresses with the exuberant green of the exotic vegetation of the Square Guynemer, a small garden at the end of the Boulevard Carnot. Predominant are the palm-trees that are typical for the warm Mediterranean climate. Among the green landscape, the bunting with French flags stands out, reminding of the status of Algeria as a French colony at that time. At the centre of the square stands a monument to the French World War I flying ace, Georges Guynemer. Marquet painted this view at the end of 1944 or in 1945, when he returned from the couples war-time home in Sidi Saïd to this city apartment after the troops had left. The harmonious combination of the luxuriant green vegetation, whose mauve shadows fall on the hot yellow walkways and protect the small figures from the intense North African sunlight, painted with incredible softness, transmit the feeling of optimism near the end of the War, captured in a view from the artist’s window.


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