The Seine in Paris

One of these two paintings from the museum’s collection were made on the same theme, during a visit to Paris, certainly with a sense of nostalgia for the period that the artist had spent there studying, some thirty years earlier. In 1906, the atmosphere in the capital of the arts was in a state of great agitation caused by the first retrospective exhibition dedicated to Paul Cézanne, who had recently passed away, and which proved to be fundamental for the subsequent development of the young artists Braque and Picasso, the founders of cubism. Marques de Oliveira, however, remained faithful to the training he had received as a naturalist artist, here cloaked in a halo of unreality, resulting from the city’s hazy atmosphere.
The metaphor of music is suited to the appreciation of these paintings, which use the same pictorial device to describe the houses, the bridge, the walls, the human figures, mere patches of colour without any individuality. These remarkable exercises in composition, centred on the dull body of the river and spreading from there to an evocation of the city, also demonstrate the influence of Corot, through the way in which the image of Paris is constructed as the natural irradiation of its architecture. The dominant grey notes are surrounded by a halo of rose-coloured and golden chords that do not bring any warmth to the themes, but instead deepen their hidden sadness, in this way representing the timelessness of a painting that does not seek to confront reality, but rather to plunge deeper into it, in an attitude of silent self-effacement.
Raquel Henriques da Silva