Square of St. Trinity in Paris (Place de la Trinité à Paris)

The organizers of the Marquet exhibition in Bordeaux and Paris in 1975 dated this picture to 1910, but Francis Jourdain, a close acquaintance of Marquet, preferred 1911. Some confirmation of the later date comes from the outline of the Sacré-Coeur Basilica on Montmartre. In the painting we can clearly make out the fully completed belltower of the church, work on which only finished in the second half of 1910, nearer to the end of the year. Evidently, Marquet was attracted by the compositional echoes of the two new churches – the Sacré-Coeur and the Église de la Sainte-Trinité. In both cases, the architects strove to emphasize the lines of vertical ascent above the general city skyline. Those same lines are dominant in Marquet’s composition as well.
Before him, Renoir and Pissarro had tried their hand at depicting La Trinité. In his picture from around 1875 (Hiroshima Museum of Art, Japan), Renoir chose the same angle of view. Marquet was probably familiar with his predecessors’ works, but, avoiding Impressionistic vibrations of colour, he pursued greater concision and constructiveness. In the spring of 1911, at an exhibition in the Galerie Druet, Marquet showed two views of the Place de la Trinité – one in sunshine, the other on a cloudy day. The Hermitage painting is evidently that second urban landscape.
Commentary by Albert Kostenevich