Tennessee Williams wrote Blanche DuBois as a woman whose grip on reality loosens with every scene — desire, delusion, and desperation bleeding into each other until there is no clear line between what is happening and what she imagines

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Claude MarQuis painted that disintegration.

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The Streetcar Named Desire Series (1995) is a body of over twenty works — approximately twelve of which were exhibited at Market Station, Ottawa, where every painting sold. The models were Marquis’s sister Nicole as Blanche DuBois and his cousin Benoît as Stanley Kowalski. But these are not costume portraits or theatrical illustrations. The figures are rendered through the lens of Blanche's mounting delusions — lurid, hallucinatory colour that has nothing to do with the room they are standing in and everything to do with the mind she is losing.

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The palette burns. Figures emerge in searing orange and electric teal, acid yellow and deep cobalt — colours that feel like fever, like desire, like the moment before something breaks. The cool psychological restraint of MarQuis's earlier Worriers Series is gone entirely. These paintings do not contemplate. They smoulder, collapse, and rage.

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Hands appear throughout — clutching heads, holding cigarettes, reaching, covering. In one striking painting, Blanche and Stanley share the canvas — she lit and exposed in the foreground, he receding into shadow behind her. Proximity without intimacy. The whole play in a single frame.

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The titles were originally drawn directly from Williams's dialogue, capturing the play's emotional extremes: "I don't want realism. I want magic," "He's like an animal. He has an animal's habits." "My head is swimming." Each painting a different line. Each line a different degree of unraveling.

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Inspired by A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams (1947).