Painted in 1754, Claude-Joseph Vernet's L'entrée du port de Marseille is one of the canonical works of the Ports of France series — fifteen large paintings commissioned by Louis XV's Marquis de Marigny to document the major ports of the French kingdom. Vernet worked on the series from 1753 to 1765, traveling between the ports of Bayonne, Bordeaux, La Rochelle, Rochefort, Marseille, Antibes, Sète, Toulon, and Dieppe and producing paintings that combined topographical accuracy with the conventions of high European marine painting.
The Marseille painting depicts the harbor mouth in the early morning, with merchants and dockworkers loading goods on the foreground quay while ships of various nationalities lie at anchor. Marseille at the mid-eighteenth century was the largest Mediterranean port of France, the commercial gateway to Levantine trade (Ottoman territories, Persia, India via the overland routes), and the city through which French luxury imports and exports flowed. The painting documents the commercial-architectural state of the port immediately before the Marseille plague of 1720 had reshaped the city's fortunes.
The Ports of France series is held in the Musée national de la Marine in Paris, with several paintings on long-term loan to the Louvre. The series is among the most ambitious state-commissioned topographical-painting projects of the entire Ancien Régime — a parallel in eighteenth-century France to Canaletto's earlier Venice vedute commissions for the British Grand Tour market.
