View of Toulon Harbour

Counted as one of the painters that represent Fauvism along with Matisse and others, Marquet was inherently sensitive more to nuanced balanced tones than to strong colors. In his late works, his colors became even softer. Even though he was taking part in the Fauve movement because he was a close friend of Matisse, he kept a distance from the group. In light of his temperament, Marquet was a realist following the traditions of Corot and Courbet. Marquet’s talent lay in his ability to represent scenes with limpid clarity.
Harbor scenes are one of his favorite subjects. In this work, he painted a cove in southern France drenched with warm sunshine, using tranquil color tones. Toulon is a naval port city on the Mediterranean, located around 50 kilometers east of Marseilles, which faces a bay sheltered by a cape protruding from west to east. It is also quite close to Aix-en-Provence, where Cézanne worked on painting. Since Henry IV improved the harbor and castle and built a naval arsenal in the 16th century, Toulon developed as a city of naval port and shipbuilding industry. During the French Revolution, the city became a hub for counter-revolutionary royalists. Along with his friends including Manguin, Camoin, Matisse and Signac, Marquet traveled to southern France in 1905. It is speculated that this painting were created based on the materials gathered during this trip.
There is a work entitled View of Agay, which was painted in 1905, in the Centre Pompidou (National Museum of Modern Art) in Paris, and its perspective and brushstrokes that depict the sea and peninsula looking through the trees are similar to the View of Toulon Harbour. This is one of his representative paintings that exhibit Marquet’s early style.