[2] At the Salon des Indépendants of 1912, Apollinaire had noticed the classical Ingresque qualities of Metzinger's Le Port, and suggested that it deserved to be hung in the Musée du Luxembourg's modern art collection.

Le Port, probably an oil on canvas, depicts a complex harbor scene with sailboats, surrounding buildings and shuttered windows.

Rather than depicting The Harbor from one classical point of view, Metzinger has used a 'mobile perspective' to portray the subject from a variety of locations and from different angles at various moments in time.

[3][4] Metzinger and Gleizes wrote with reference to non-Euclidean geometry in Du "Cubisme", the manifesto in which The Harbor was selected, amongst other paintings, to represent the Cubist methodology.

All of the objects represented by Metzinger in this painting are embedded in the non-Euclidean Riemannian (or pseudo-Riemannian) manifold of constant positive Gaussian curvature.

In addition, each element or constituent of the painting partakes in the overall scheme of things subjectively, in each individual's mental realization (according to Roger Allard, 1910).

[6] This reciprocity between the artist and the public is perhaps one of the reasons Metzinger felt the need to include elements of the real world into his paintings of the period, untouched by the wrath of total abstraction.

[9][10] The art critic Olivier-Hourcade writes of this exhibition in 1912 and its relation to the creation of a new French school: Roger Allard's reviewed the 1912 Salon des Indépendants in the March–April 1912 issue of La Revue de France et des Pays, noting Metzinger's 'refined choice of colors' and the 'precious rarity' of the painting's 'matière'.