Antoine Vollon, 'View of the Harbour at Marseilles', about 1882

French painter Antoine Vollon captured a grey day in the Mediterranean coastal city of Marseilles. His spontaneous technique and visible brushstrokes convey the movement of the clouds across the sky and the rolling of the sea. Vollon often painted in the open air (en plein air) and this work records the fleeting effects of light in both sky and sea. In contrast, the buildings are an indistinct mass. The gulls wheel close to the water and the rigging and masts of the ships seem to move. It is possible to imagine the wind blowing across the harbour, from the left to the right of the canvas.

Although largely forgotten today, during his lifetime Vollon was a celebrity. He was widely praised for his work, in particular his painterly effects. His contributions to the annual Salons were well received by critics, and a number of paintings were purchased by the state. He specialised in still lifes, considered a lesser genre in the nineteenth century, but also produced highly regarded landscapes and seascapes. His still lifes were often compared to those of seventeenth-century Dutch painters or to the work of Jean-Siméon Chardin. The muted, dark palette of this harbour scene may have been inspired by Chardin’s use of colour. The treatment of the sky in this painting also owes a debt to Eugène Boudin, who was an important early influence on Impressionism. The two artists painted together in Trouville in Normandy in 1870.

Vollon was initially trained as an engraver at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Lyons. In 1859 he moved to Paris to become a painter and seems to have been largely self-taught. He exhibited his work at the Salon des Refuses in 1863, alongside Edouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) and James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s Symphony in White (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC). This was his closest brush with the avant-garde. In the following year he exhibited at the Salon and continued to do so throughout his career. In 1870 Vollon was part of the Salon jury that decided which paintings would be shown, as well as being an ongoing exhibitor himself. For a self-trained artist, this was a major achievement. Vollon was made a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur in 1870 and promoted to Officier in 1878. In 1900 he was awarded the Grand Prix at the Paris World’s Fair.