David Marquis

This painting the museum has is a very early working as 1904. I am so struck by and this one I worked in on the Messinger, came in. It had a varnish, a varnish had yellowed, was very dark. You couldn’t see these colors. So when I was removing the varnish and years of grime, the cleaning was incredibly dramatic and it was like we are seeing the painting as it was intended to be seen for the first time in probably you know 60, 70 years.

And it was a revelation to Patrick; it was revelation to me. The incredible beauty and well-organized color. It’s so well thought out and so well organized and yet it feels like he just did it in the afternoon on a day out in the field, he is working at his easel and just threw this thing together and yet the more you look at it, the more you realize, wow this is so well thought out. The proportions of the color, the placement of the colors, the overall design, the fact that this green in the lower corner keeps your eye from drifting off. If you take that green out of the lower right corner, and just have that path go all the way out, your eye would just drift off, but this holds you in and it keeps your eye moving around the design. I was stunned by the composition and how almost classical. There is nothing accidental in this painting.