Maurice de Vlaminck

Maurice de Vlaminck was born in Paris in 1876 to a Flemish father and a French mother. He grew up in a musical household, moved to Chatou at sixteen, and supported his young family as a professional cyclist and itinerant violinist before painting became his full-time work. The Musée d’Orsay also records his work as a watercolourist, draughtsman, illustrator, printmaker, and writer.

Vlaminck was largely self-taught. In 1900 he shared a studio on the Île de Chatou with André Derain. The vivid colour and bold brushwork that Vlaminck and Derain developed there became associated with the School of Chatou. Their local subject matter—the Seine, the village, bridges, trees, and boats—gave the emerging language of Fauvism a setting just west of Paris.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art identifies Vlaminck as a major Fauve whose intense colour matched his exuberant temperament. After seeing the Van Gogh retrospective at the Salon des Indépendants in spring 1905 and the paintings Matisse and Derain made at Collioure, he pushed decisively toward the Fauvist style. The Musée d’Orsay records his participation in the Salon d’Automne and Salon des Indépendants that year.

Early in 1906 the dealer Ambroise Vollard bought Vlaminck’s existing stock, allowing him to devote himself fully to painting. He spent that summer working in and around Chatou. In The Seine at Chatou, primary colours applied in daubs and swirls transform the familiar river landscape into a direct, physical expression of paint.