Farmyard at La Percaillerie

Marquet's 'Farmyard at La Percaillerie,' painted in 1901, records a visit to Normandy where he explored the agricultural landscape surrounding a coastal village. The farmyard offered a subject far removed from his urban Paris views—enclosed, earth-coloured, unglamorous. Marquet's willingness to apply his reductive visual method to unfashionable rural subject matter reflects the seriousness of his developing practice, treating a muddy farmyard with the same tonal intelligence he brought to the Seine embankment. The work passed through private hands rather than entering a named public collection.

The composition is built from horizontal and vertical registers—the yard's flat ground, the buildings' walls, and the sky—held together by a muted warm palette of ochres and greys. Marquet's flat handling avoids the pastoral sentimentality that might have softened the subject's prosaic character.