View of Agay 1905

Albert Marquet made this painting, ‘View of Agay’, with what looks like confident, juicy brushstrokes laid wet-on-wet. You can really feel him figuring out the scene as he goes. I love how he’s built up the scene from foreground to background. The plants at the front feel almost abstract, like pure color and form, especially those bright yellow tips that pull your eye in. Look closely, and you can see how the paint is thick in some spots, almost sculptural, and thin in others, letting the canvas breathe. That broken brushwork gives the whole thing a lively, flickering quality, like the light is constantly shifting. It reminds me of the way Pierre Bonnard used color to capture a mood. Marquet isn’t trying to give us a photo-realistic view. Instead, he’s inviting us to see the world through his eyes, to feel the warmth of the sun and the cool of the water. It’s less about what’s there, and more about how it feels to be there.