Acquired by the family of the present owner in Paris in the 1950s

(possibly) Paris, Salon d'Automne, 1907

Maïthé Vallès-Bled, Vlaminck. Catalogue critique des peintures et céramiques de la période fauve, Paris, 2008, no. 176, illustrated in colour p. 389

The canvas is unlined and there is no evidence of retouching under ultra-violet light. This work is in very good original condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate, although stronger and richer in the original.
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The present work depicts the river Seine near Chatou (fig. 1), a small town located just north-west of Paris. Vlaminck, who moved to this region at the age of sixteen, was deeply attached to the local landscape which he strove to render in his paintings with the utmost intensity. It was at Chatou that one of the critical partnerships at the core of the Fauve movement began with the chance meeting of Vlaminck and André Derain in June 1900. When their outbound train derailed shortly after leaving Paris, the two artists 'struck up a conversation while walking the rest of the way to Chatou, where they both lived. It turned out that they both painted, and... they agreed to meet the next day under the Pont de Chatou... with their canvases. So it was, as Vlaminck later said in his typically ocular manner, that the "School of Chatou was created"' (John Klein, The Fauve Landscape (exhibition catalogue), Metropolitan Museum of Artꦍ, New York, 1990, p. 123).

 

Subsequently, Vlaminck and Derain shared a studio, and over the following years regularly painted together, often depicting the same views. Unlike Derain's portrayals of the Chatou landscape, which were more radical in composition, 'Vlaminck would generally set up a firm but unobtrusive structure that imposed further order on a landscape already highly mediated by suburban development. Such a solid... approach to composition enabled him to organize and make legible his arbitrary treatment of colour and abrupt, summary brushwork' (ibid., p. 124). Vlaminck rarely left this region during his Fauvist years, preferring its surroundings along the Seine over the landscapes of the south of France, favo🀅ured by Matisse, Derain and Braque. He drew﷽ inspiration for most of his early landscapes from this region, many of them, including the present work, characterised by the red-tiled roofs typical of the surrounding villages.

 

Painted around 1906-07, Chatou, le pont exemplifies and important stylistic shift in Vlaminck's painting that took place during this period. While displaying a colouristic boldness characteristic of his Fauve works, particularly in the fierce red and pink hues of the tree and the houses, the predominantly blue palette heralds Vlaminck's 'Cézannesque' period that would dominate in the years to come. Furthermore, the red tree, acting as a dramatic perspectival device, also reflects the influence of Cézanne on this pivotal period of Vlaminck's art. In a discussion of Vlaminck's paintings from this period, John Elderfield notes: 'His paintings of 1906 reveal not only the artist more instinctively attuned to the substance of paint than any Fauve except Matisse, but also the one who managed to consolidate and find continued new expression in the broken Impressionist-derived touch that the others rejected... He was the single member of the group who managed to sustain the sheer spontaneity of the original Fauve vision, and who achieved the emphatic pictorial openness and expansive flatness characteristic of the second Fauve style' (J. Elderfield in Fauvism and its Affinities (exhib🎶ition catalogue), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1976, p. 71).

 

An expression of his youthful instincts, Vlaminck's passion for colour was, however, not unprecedented. In 1901 he saw the first retrospective exhibition of Van Gogh's work, held at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris, an experience that was to determine his artistic direction. Writing about the influence of Van Gogh on Vlaminck's art of this period, John Rewald commented: 'In spite of all his admiration for all of van Gogh's canvases, he immediately recognized in him a formidable adversary. Here was a man who had the same aspirations as himself, who had translated in his work the same torments and exaltations, the same visions and impressions with which he was struggling. And he had translated them with pure colors and brushstrokes, so expressive that all his emotions seemed to lay bare his canvases. Compared with the pursuit of delicate light effects characteristic of the Impressionists, whose pictures Vlaminck had seen occasionally in Paris, van Gogh suddenly burst forth with an unprecedented intensity of color and design. Back in Chatou, Vlaminck began to assimilate van Gogh's lesson' (J. Rewald, Modern Masters, Manet to Matisse, New York, 1975, p. 116).

 

Fig. 1, The Seine and le Pont de Chatou, circa 1900-05

Fig. 2, Maurice de Vlaminck, Le Soleil sur l'eau, 1905, oil on canvas, The Metropolitan ൲Museum꧋ of Art, New York