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Lot Essay
Scenes of Collioure—all captured through brilliant color and enlivened brushwork—flooded the walls of Paris’s bustling Salon d’Automne in the fall of 1905, a pivotal turning point that would thereon alter the course of Western 20th Century painting. It was here that these young artists, largely unknown at the time, first gained notoriety as Les Fauves, the core group which counted Henri Matisse, Maurice de Vlaminck and Derain among its ranks. This revolution of color and painterly qualities, however, had first sowed its seeds four years prior, in the summer of 1900, when the present painting, Environs de Chatou, was executed.
Derain first met Vlaminck by chance during this summer, while on a train from Paris to their mutual hometown, Chatou, a picturesque suburb set on the Seine to the northwest of Paris. When their train derailed, the budding young artists, immediately struck up a friendship. Following this most fortuitous encounter, the two set immediate plans to paint the following day. Soon the two would share a studio in Chatou, painting side by side in the landscape and experimenting with an increasingly bold palette and thick, impastoed paint handling. “Each of us set up his easel”, Vlaminck recalled. “Derain facing Chatou…myself to one side, attracted by the poplars. Naturally I finished first. I walked over to Derain holding my canvas against my legs so that he couldn’t see it. I looked at his picture. Solid, skillful, powerful, already a Derain. ‘What about yours?’ he said. I spun my canvas around. Derain looked at it in silence for a minute, nodded his head and declared, ‘Very fine’. That was the starting point of all Fauvism” (Vlaminck, quoted in J. Elderfield, The “Wild Beasts”: Fauvism and its affinities, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1976, p. 30).
The present work, luminous and expressive in its handling, speaks to the ebullience at the heart of these early experimental years. Here, Derain renders the Chatou landscape through active brushwork and vibrant hues of electric greens and salmon pinks, tinging the landscape with the warmth of summer’s sun. Already at this juvenilia date, flashes of cherry red and Prussian blue enliven the canvas in unmistakable anticipation of the artist’s later Fauvist experimentations, the pictures which would feature in the 1905 Salon d’Automne exhibition and eventually vault the artist towards his present continued acclaim. Pitching their easels side by side during this critical early collaboration of 1900, together Derain and Vlaminck—and eventually Matisse—continued the rupturing of the pictorial plane that their late 19th Century predecessors had begun and, what’s more, the propulsion of Modernism into the 20th Century. John Richardson later detailed this great influence as, just a few years later, "Derain became Picasso's yardstick. Until the outbreak of World War I, he would be the norm against which Picasso would measure the progress he was making as a cubist" (in A Life of Picasso, Vol. II, 1907-1917, New York, 1996, p. 77).
Derain first met Vlaminck by chance during this summer, while on a train from Paris to their mutual hometown, Chatou, a picturesque suburb set on the Seine to the northwest of Paris. When their train derailed, the budding young artists, immediately struck up a friendship. Following this most fortuitous encounter, the two set immediate plans to paint the following day. Soon the two would share a studio in Chatou, painting side by side in the landscape and experimenting with an increasingly bold palette and thick, impastoed paint handling. “Each of us set up his easel”, Vlaminck recalled. “Derain facing Chatou…myself to one side, attracted by the poplars. Naturally I finished first. I walked over to Derain holding my canvas against my legs so that he couldn’t see it. I looked at his picture. Solid, skillful, powerful, already a Derain. ‘What about yours?’ he said. I spun my canvas around. Derain looked at it in silence for a minute, nodded his head and declared, ‘Very fine’. That was the starting point of all Fauvism” (Vlaminck, quoted in J. Elderfield, The “Wild Beasts”: Fauvism and its affinities, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1976, p. 30).
The present work, luminous and expressive in its handling, speaks to the ebullience at the heart of these early experimental years. Here, Derain renders the Chatou landscape through active brushwork and vibrant hues of electric greens and salmon pinks, tinging the landscape with the warmth of summer’s sun. Already at this juvenilia date, flashes of cherry red and Prussian blue enliven the canvas in unmistakable anticipation of the artist’s later Fauvist experimentations, the pictures which would feature in the 1905 Salon d’Automne exhibition and eventually vault the artist towards his present continued acclaim. Pitching their easels side by side during this critical early collaboration of 1900, together Derain and Vlaminck—and eventually Matisse—continued the rupturing of the pictorial plane that their late 19th Century predecessors had begun and, what’s more, the propulsion of Modernism into the 20th Century. John Richardson later detailed this great influence as, just a few years later, "Derain became Picasso's yardstick. Until the outbreak of World War I, he would be the norm against which Picasso would measure the progress he was making as a cubist" (in A Life of Picasso, Vol. II, 1907-1917, New York, 1996, p. 77).