Painted in the summer of 1939, Porquerolles, après-midi d'été captures the Mediterranean in a moment of suspended calm, just before the world that produced it would be irrevocably altered. Albert Marquet chose the sheltered harbor village of Porquerolles, one of the Provençal Îles d'Hyères southeast of Toulon, and rendered it with the distilled precision that distinguishes his finest work. The sea reads as a pristine aquamarine, deepened in pictorial weight by the more saturated blue of a central boat whose mast, hull, and rigging are conjured with an economy of bold strokes and a few accents of lipstick red. Against this, the pale yellow stone of the Fort Saint Agathe catches the afternoon light on the wooded hillside, and the church tower anchors a composition built on the quiet tension between horizontals and verticals, shoreline and jetty, water and sky. A single small child gazes toward the water from the quay, the only human presence in a scene otherwise given over entirely to light, color, and stillness. The painting belongs to a concentrated series Marquet made at Porquerolles across 1938 and 1939, a body of work that demonstrates how completely he had internalized the Fauvist inheritance forged in Gustave Moreau's studio alongside Matisse, Rouault, Manguin, and Camoin, and announced to the world at the landmark Salon d'Automne of 1905. By 1939, however, Marquet's palette had become something entirely his own, never obvious, never decorative in a superficial sense, but built from hues that carry an almost uncanny descriptive accuracy. The aquamarine of the harbor, the particular weight of the Mediterranean blue, the warm ochre of the fort and slopes behind, these are not approximations of a southern landscape but its felt equivalent. Marquet spent the greater part of his life along the banks of the Seine, and water in all its forms, rivers, harbors, open coastline, remained the sustained subject of a career defined by sensitive and unhurried observation. His travels took him to North Africa, England, and the Soviet Union, among other destinations, yet the ports and inlets of his native France drew him back repeatedly, and Porquerolles clearly held a particular fascination. At 46 by 61 centimeters, this is a work of intimate scale that rewards sustained looking, the geometric precision of its structure revealing itself gradually beneath what first appears as effortless simplicity. It is signed by the artist and currently held at Richard Green Gallery.