Le Port de Saint-Tropez (Port of Saint-Tropez)

Under the dazzling sun of Southern France, ships with white sails rest, and people come and go along the waterfront.

A simple, everyday scene of a small fishing village, viewed from a hotel room overlooking the harbor.

However, in the summer of 1905, when this painting was created, this tranquil port town was actually enveloped in an intense fervor of young artists.

His close friends Henri Manguin, Charles Camoin, and Paul Signac, among others, gathered, and a painting revolution of intense colors, which would later be known as 'Fauvism,' was about to ignite.

While his companions stayed in a villa with a scenic view on a hill, depicting the nature of Southern France with fiery colors, Marquet alone complained that it was 'too far from the port' and took a room by himself in a hotel along the coast.

Even as he enjoyed passionate artistic discussions with his friends and hedonistic nights out in the town, what he truly loved was the quietly swaying water surface before him and the unpretentious daily lives of the sailors.

Even as the surrounding painters burned with intense passion, clashing primary colors, he alone never lost himself, continuing to gaze at the scene before him with a somewhat calm and poetic eye.

This is a piece imbued with the quiet and unwavering will of a painter who, even at the heart of a whirlwind of fervor, never got swept away, striving to depict the serene harmony of the waterfront.