Maurice de Vlaminck

Galerie d'art de la Corraterie, Geneva
Acquired from the above by the present owner circa 2000

The canvas has been strip-lined. There are some areas of retouching visible under UV light, predominantly to the sky and to the lower edge. To the centre of the right edge there is a small punctuation visible on the reverse of the canvas, possibly a minor repaired tear with associated retouchings on the recto. There are some fine lines of stable craquelure in places. This work is in overall good condition.
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The present work is a charming and atmospheric depiction of the river L’Oise, near Valmondois, a small town located just north of Paris. Vlaminck was deeply attached to the local landscape which he strove to render with the utmost intensity.

Vlaminck bought a house in Valmondois in 1919, where he lived until 1925. Van Gogh had died nearby about twenty years earlier and it is thought that this artistic connection attracted Vlaminck to the area. Indeed, he readily acknowledged the importance of the Dutch artist, whose paintings he first saw in an exhibition at Bernheim-Jeune in 1901. 'In him I found some of my own aspirations,' Vlaminck recalled, 'and as well as a revolutionary fervor an almost religious feeling for the interpretation of nature' (quoted in The Fauve Landscape (exhibition catalogue), The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, 1990, p. 2l). Vlaminck revelled in the artistic potential of the lush countryside in Northern France, the chief source of artistic inspiration for the remainder of his career.

Moulin sur le Sausseron à Valmondois is a wonderful example of the artist’s post-fauvist period. By 1907 Vlaminck had become artistically increasingly dissatisfied and it was Cézanne's work that made a profound impression on the young artist. In the present work this influence becomes evident in a more structured approach opposed to the perceived formlessness of fauve landscapes and an increasingly naturalistic use of colour.