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Artist or Maker: Maurice de Vlaminck (1876-1958)
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Provenance: M. Bing, Paris.
Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, by whom acquired from the above, possibly in 1950.
Private collection, acquired from the above in 1954.
Anonymous sale, Sotheby's London, May 1994, lot 23.
Private collection, Germany, acquired at the above sale; sale, Christie's, London, 25 June 2001, lot 16 (£4,733,750).
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.
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Exhibited: New York, Perls Galleries, Vlaminck, 1968, no. 19 (illustrated in colour p. 26).
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Literature: P. Mac Orlan, Vlaminck, Peintures 1900-45, Paris, 1945 (illustrated on the cover and titled Le remorqueur).
M. Sauvage, Vlaminck, Sa Vie et Son Message, Geneva, 1956, no. 36 (illustrated pl. 36 and titled Le remorqueur).
P. Negri, Matisse e i Fauves, Milan, 1969 (illustrated pl. 34). Fratelli Fabri (ed.), L'Arte Moderna, vol. III, 1975, no. 26 (illustrated).
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Notes: Property from a Private American Collection
Vlaminck moved to the area of Chatou, a small suburb on the Seine near the outskirts of Paris, in 1892. It was here that he was to paint many of his finest 'fauve' paintings, depicting in rich vibrant colours, the local landscape and the life of the riverside.
Vlaminck's greatest Chatou paintings date from the short period after his chance meeting with André Derain in the summer of 1900. It was this meeting, and the friendship which ensued, which led to the creation of the so-called 'School of Chatou', a school which in reality was more of a friendly partnership. When the train which both Vlaminck and Derain were travelling on 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 they both painted, and..they agreed to meet the next day under the Pont de Chatou with their canvases' (Fig.1) (quoted in J. Klein, The Fauve Landscape, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1990, p. 123).
In 1901, the year after his meeting with Derain, Vlaminck attended the exhibition by Van Gogh at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris; this revolutionised his work. Van Gogh's interest in the separateness of paint, struck a chord with Vlaminck and found a resonance in his art. Such generous use of vibrant impasto is a prominent feature of the present.
In a discussion of Vlaminck's paintings from this period, John Elderfield notes that his paintings, 'reveal not 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' (quoted in J. Elderfield, 'The Wild Beasts' in Fauvism and its Affinities, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1976, p. 71.
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