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1880-1954
ENTRÉE DU PORT À PORT-VENDRES

measurements
73 by 92cm.

alternate measurements
28 3/4 by 36 1/4 in.

Painted circa 1906.

signed A Derain (lower right)

oil on canvas

PROVENANCE

Jacques Netter, Paris
Purchased from the above by the present owner

EXHIBITED

Nice, Grands peintres de la Méditerranée, 1946, no. 12
London, The Lefevre Gallery (Alex Reid & Lefevre, Ltd.), Important XIX & XX Century Works of Art, 1997, no. 8, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Lodève, Musée du Lodéve, Derain et Vlaminck, 1900-1915, 2001, no. 25, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Saint-Tropez, L'Annonciade, André Derain. Paysages du Midi, 2003, no. 5, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

LITERATURE

Michel Kellermann, André Derain. Catalogue raisonné de l'~uvre peint, Paris, 1999, vol. III, no. 2218, illustrated p. 209

NOTE

Dating from circa 1906, the present work was painted at the height of Derain's Fauve style. In July 1905 Derain's father sent him to Collioure a harbour town on the Spanish border where he spent the next two months working with Matisse. On leaving Collioure, Derain travelled along the cost to L'Estaque, Marseilles and Agay before returning to Paris in September. L'Entrée du port -- à Port-Vendres, was probably painted during this period or later in 1906 when he revisited the Marseilles area. It was during Derain's stay at L'Estaque, in 1906 that a turning point occurred in his ~uvre: in these landscapes, the artist fused the lessons from the previous summer spent with Matisse at Collioure and from his two months in London in early 1906 into a radically new form of landscape painting with little semblance to naturalistic colour. While in Collioure, Derain's preoccupation with light and colour of the Mediterranean freed his palette, leading him to explore a new purified form of painting where strongly contrasting areas of colour came to achieve new prominence. When Derain arrived in Collioure, Matisse, under the influence of Signac and Cross, was painting brilliant, intense colours in a framework of mosaic-like short brushstrokes.

In the present work the hallmarks of the Fauve style are very much in evidence. The dazzling effect of light on water is captured in brushstrokes of pure, primary tones set against a white ground. Derain has rendered the boats as a vibrant flat pattern of juxtaposed complementary colour contrasts. Georges Duthuit wrote: 'his forms are sometimes reduced to the point of fragility; and sometimes he has recourse to a jerky line in order to animate colored planes incapable of setting themselves in motion of their own accord. If Gauguin's drawing has less breadth than he expected, Derain's often shrinks to the infinitesimal [...] This whittling down, no less than that of the polychrome compound, arises largely from preoccupation with style' (G. Duthuit, The Fauvist Painters, New York, 1950, p. 47). By the summer of 1906, Derain had shifted his emphasis and he began to infuse the landscapes executed at L'Estaque and its surroundings with a mood of ideal and primitivist isolation. The influence of Gauguin's Tahitian works is visible in Derain's use of even more vivid colour than before, linked to areas of purely decorative infilling and strongly curvilinear forms.