Mediterranean fishing schooners are shown in the outer port of Marseilles. The harbour entrance is marked on the left by a lighthouse while buildings within the outer wall of the harbour, and a signal station, are shown in the background. The three boats in the foreground have been painted with formalistic clarity and precision, demonstrating an awareness of form and shape characteristic of contemporary innovative European artistic practice of the period. The repetition of simplified lines on the boats and rigging, and in the arches of the harbour wall behind, produces a harmonious and classic design. The lack of human presence and the appearance of the limp sails creates an eerie, dreamlike and surreal atmosphere. The artist has also used a subtle range of soft and shimmering colours that convey the peculiar qualities of Mediterranean light. The atmosphere thus evoked has much to do with his increasing obsession with the technical quality of his painting method, using the medium of tempera.

The painting is highly individual but the carefully balanced composition is consistent with the artistic return to a form of classicism and realism after the First World War. This was a response to the horrors of war as well as a reaction to the problems attendant on revolutionary, innovative pre-war movements. The painting forms one of a sequence of English and French port scenes of the 1920s, following one of La Rochelle in 1923 and preceding one of St Tropez in 1926.

Wadsworth was a pioneer of abstract painting and, as a founder of the Vorticist movement, was among the first British artists experimenting with Cubist principles. He used Cubo-Futurism as a basis for developing an art that was geometrical to the point of abstraction. During the war he served as an intelligence officer in the Navy and was invalided out in 1917. He returned to England to work on a scheme of dazzle- camouflage for ships and was able to rely heavily on his artistic experience to vary the zigzag patterns, which were intended to mislead enemy lookouts. This work provided a source of inspiration for one of his monumental war paintings. During the 1920s he returned to a more representational painting style, travelled extensively abroad and pioneered the revival of tempera, a method which employs egg to bind powdered pigments together and which creates a highly opaque and permanent finish. His interest in nautical subjects is manifest in the wide variety that he produced from this period to his death. In 1936 he completed the large panels for the smoking rooms of the Queen Mary. The painting is signed, bottom right, 'Edward Wadsworth 1924'.