Les Toits rouges

Les Toits rouges — the red rooftops — was painted by Albert Marquet in 1903, the year before his participation in the Salon d'Automne that launched Fauvism as a recognized movement. Marquet was among the group of painters working around Matisse at the École des Beaux-Arts under Gustave Moreau and then in the studio of the Nabis, and this rooftop view shows him developing the simplified, flattened treatment of urban space that would characterize his mature work. The red roofs of Montmartre or another Parisian neighborhood seen from an elevated vantage point gave Marquet a subject he could treat as pure pattern — a grid of warm colors against sky — consistent with his move toward formal simplicity. MuMa in Le Havre holds this as part of its Marquet collection.

Marquet applies paint in broad, confident areas of simplified color with minimal modeling, treating the rooftops as a flat pattern of warm reds and ochres rather than three-dimensional architectural forms. His handling is already close to the Fauve simplification he would embrace fully in 1905.