Masterpiece: Fauvist Submarines, 1915, Cubist Harbour Scene by Bloomsbury Group Artist Jean Hippolyte Marchand Large Antique Oil on Canvas

In 1915, Bloomsbury art critic Clive Bell wrote: ‘No living painter is more purely concerned with the creation of form and the emotional significance of shapes and colours than Marchand". Our painting by the artist, dating from this precise period, is the most striking example of this.

Jean Hippolyte Marchand (1883-1941) would have been in his early thirties when he painted this extraordinary scene featuring the French Brumaire-class submarines Newton and Volta at La Rochelle harbour.

As a young man of his time, I imagine he was passionate about technology: seeing these boats, launched just a few years earlier, must have been a quite an experience.

Marchand creates an intelligent juxtaposition between the whale-like warships and an almost surreal azure sea under purple skies.

The composition and colours are almost impossibly modern: buildings, cranes and masts are set like cubist lego pieces in this most colourful of industrial cargo ports.

One of the leading artists of his generation. Jean Marchand was fauve and cubist painter, printmaker and illustrator who became closely linked to the Bloomsbury Group.

In 1910, his painting Still Life with Bananas was exhibited in the 1910 "Manet and Post-Impressionism" show organised by Roger Fry. It was also shown in 1912 in a second exhibition organised by Fry with Clive Bell at the Grafton Galleries in London. Crane Kalman Galleries in London organised a major retrospective of the artist in 1967.

Paintings by Jean Marchand are in the collections of the Courtault, the Tate, and in numerous museums in Britain and worldwide. The National Gallery of Ireland owns five oils by the artist.

Our painting measures 55 x 64 cm and is signed at the lower left. It is annotated on the central stretcher 'sous marins Newton and Volta au port la Pallice" (Pallice being the name of the commercial port at la Rochelle, as opposed to the "old" harbour. On the verso feature also several inventory numbers and an old label from a London shipper. The overall framed size in a period hand sculpted "Montparnasse" frame is 77 x 88 cm

For an analogous work that was certainly painted during the same sojourn at La Rochelle, please see the artist's painting in the Gloucester Museums Service Art Collection

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