A Fauve from the very outset, Albert Marquet was also an original Fauve, and moreover, an independent Fauve who in many ways distanced himself from Fauvism.”[42] Bernard Dorival wrote those words in 1944, while Marquet was still alive and no one since has managed to define more precisely the artist’s relationship to Fauvism.
“Marquet, as it has been observed and is patently evident, has nothing of the Fauve about him,” Vauxcelles wrote.[43] “He does not roar, he speaks and he has always spoken in a precisely measured manner; romantic truculence is not a characteristic of the ironical man from Bordeaux. ... He only entered the ‘central cage’ at the 1905 Salon d’Automne so as not to abandon his pals...” Vauxcelles could find nothing in common between Marquet and the Fauves.
“Of all the Fauves, he was the least violent,”[44] Fritz Vanderpyl wrote about Marquet, and it is hard not to agree with him. It really is the case that Marquet’s painting never possessed the violent energy of Vlaminck and that Matisse’s red never rode triumphantly through it. The texture of his painting never displayed that anarchic freedom which also became one of the outward signs of Fauvism.
Albert Marquet was born on 27 March 1875 into the family of a railway clerk in Bordeaux. The taste for drawing which Albert displayed in his childhood, at the secondary school, and his evident talent prompted his mother to conceive the idea of moving to Paris where he entered, in 1890, the École des Arts Décoratifs.
It was there that Marquet met Matisse who was six years older than him and for that reason immediately adopted a protective attitude towards him. But with Marquet that was no easy matter: even then his character was so firmly established and independent that it was impossible to make him go against his own wishes. When, in 1895, he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts with Matisse, that independence came out in his painting. Professor Gustave Moreau called Marquet “mon ennemi intime” [my intimate enemy], an epithet which expressed both his inability to overcome Marquet’s stubborn spirit of contradiction and his fondness for this pupil. Marquet had a reverence for the professor, as they all did, but his acute and specific gift as a draughtsman irresistibly distracted him away from academic lessons and the copying of the classics which Moreau so insistently preached, towards living scenes of the life he saw in the street. Marquet made copies in the Louvre like all his fellow-pupils; but did not Moreau himself advise them not to waste their youth in a studio but to become themselves in the world beyond? The professor’s rare tact as a teacher perhaps played a stronger role for Marquet than for Matisse or Rouault and when Moreau died in 1898, Marquet left the École des Beaux-Arts and for a time attended the independent Académie Carrière, along with Matisse.
By now, though, he was already a professionally mature artist and he presented his works in several places: In 1903 at Berthe Weill and at the 1905 Salon d’Automne where Marquet was among the few about whom the critics wrote in completely favourable terms — he was mentioned by François Monod in his review for the magazine Art et Décoration, while G. Kahn in La Revue illustrée expressed his delight at Marquet’s work, as did Camille Mauclair who was anything but sympathetic to the Fauves.[45]