Maurice de Vlaminck

Knud Abilgaard, Sweden
O'Hana Gallery, London (acquired circa 1966)
Samuel J. & Ethel LeFrak, New York (acquired circa 1979)
Thence by descent

O'Hana Gallery, London, Summer Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, 1966, no. 48

The canvas has been wax relined. There is some strong impasto in the sky and the green foliage. There is craquelure scattered throughout the composition but most notably in the white pigments in the lower left quadrant and across the sky. There is fine craquelure and some minor paint loss to the sky and some rubbing and paint loss to the rooftops in the right of the middle ground. When examined under UV light there is no evidence of restoration and over-painting. The surface is dirty and would benefit from a clean. The painting is in overall good condition.
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In 1892, Vlaminck moved to Châtou, a small town on the river Seine, just northwest of Paris. There, a railway bridge spanning the Seine near Versailles became the subject of numerous paintings. In 1900 Vlaminck met André Derain, who was born in Châtou, and the two artists formed a friendship and collaboration which was to culminate in the Fauve revolution. However, it must also be said that Pierre-Auguste Renoir had also painted the Châtou bridge as early as 1881, and the area to this day is known as L'Île des Impressionnistes, reflecting this rich tradition of artists working in the area around the village and its bridge.

This depiction of the Châtou landscape exemplifies the expressive brushwork and vivid palette for which Vlaminck’s Fauve compositions are renowned. Vlaminck, who later described Fauve art as a "manner of being" rather than an intellectual invention, followed his instincts in applying his paint onto canvas in an almost violent fashion. The fierce greens and blues combined with earth tone hues which dominate the scene are contrasted with the black contours, heralding Vlaminck’s "Cézannesque" period that would dominate in the years to come.

Scenes along the Seine held a central place in Vlaminck’s work and figure in many of his Fauve compositions. “It was in painting the banks of the Seine," Vlaminck would later recall, “that I tried to represent the emotion that seized hold of me when faced by this landscape… It can only have been the extraordinarily strong and powerful enthusiasm felt by my twenty-year-old-self, the rush of life that I experienced at the time,that enabled me to transpose this banal subject [The Seine], through a blaze of color, into fierce realism and exuberant picturesque!” (quoted in Maïthé Vallès-Bled, Vlaminck, Catalogue critique des peintures et céramiques de la période fauve, Paris, 2008, p. 361).