Lot 300 N

With the street lamp (“Le Réverbère”), Albert Marquet has made one of the most mundane objects imaginable the protagonist of the present painting. Slightly twisted, the lantern's mantle blown askew by the wind and marked by age, it stands like a memorial in the middle of the painting. The edge of the street is overgrown with grass and lacks a kerb, and the simple buildings visible behind it - some of them with broken-down fence posts - also display signs of age and decay. Enveloped in bright sunlight and with a cloudless blue sky above it, the view exudes a fair, summery-idle atmosphere.
In this seemingly simple view, Marquet realises a balanced composition. The placement of the lantern post almost in the middle of the painting provides for a vertical division of the pictorial space. This split is further reinforced through the cast shadow of what is presumably an additional building, which darkens a part of the roadside only in the left half of the painting. Diagonal axes running along this area of shadow, the fences and the walls of the gardens and houses conjure up the pronounced spatial depth typical of Marquet's work.
The small community of Arcueil, located to the south of Paris, has traditionally been a working-class residential area. Marquet created several views of the simple houses and lanes of this little town; with their warm tones and immersed in bright sunlight, these often display a virtually Mediterranean character.