The man who named the Fauves had reservations about one of them. Louis Vauxcelles, the critic whose offhand remark at the 1905 Salon d'Automne gave the movement its name, later wrote that Marquet "has nothing of the Fauve about him. He does not roar, he speaks and has always spoken in a precisely measured manner... He only entered the 'central cage' at the 1905 Salon d'Automne so as not to abandon his pals." It is an oddly affectionate dismissal, and closer to the truth than most accounts of Fauvism allow.

Marquet was born in Bordeaux on 27 March 1875, the son of a railway clerk. His mother moved the family to Paris to support his artistic education, and he enrolled at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs in 1890, where he met Henri Matisse; the friendship lasted the rest of his life. The two painters shared studios and worked side by side for years, but their mature styles could scarcely be more different. Where Matisse reached for triumphant colour, Marquet worked with grey haze, snow light, and the tonal restraint of an elevated viewpoint over water.

His approach is visible in "The Beach at Fécamp" (1906, 51 x 61 cm, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris): the beach runs diagonally, figures and boats reduced to laconic dark brushstrokes, with only two sailors' blue collars and a red flag providing any colour accent. Similar economy governs the Paris quai paintings in the State Hermitage: "Rainy Day. Notre Dame de Paris" (1910, 81 x 66 cm) and "Louvre Embankment and the New Bridge" (1906, 60 x 73 cm), where cold grey mist substitutes for the chromatic intensity his contemporaries were deploying elsewhere.

He continued working until days before his death. Returning from an operation on 31 January 1947, he immediately picked up his brush to capture falling snow from his apartment window at 1 Rue Dauphine, Paris. He died there on 14 June 1947.