Marquet - The Blonde Woman

Albert Marquet (1875-1947), a friend of Matisse and Derain, retained from his Fauve period a sense of colour and light. He later abandoned this style in search of a tonal balance: he liked more harmonious, less saturated colours in order to render all the nuances of light. Within a considerable body of landscape paintings, dominated by port views and the banks of the great rivers crossing European metropolises, Albert Marquet's nudes constitute a small handful of paintings, less than twenty, including "La Femme blonde" dated 1919, which is probably the last painted. These nudes, never collected in their entirety, nevertheless reveal a position of Marquet in relation to painting that places his work, more than it seems, in the lineage of Manet. The "Olympia" (1863) is indeed the model for "La Femme blonde".

The Blonde Woman, 1919,
Centre Pompidou Collection, Plastic Arts - Modern