Tugboat on the Seine, Chatou

Tugboat on the Seine, Chatou from 1906 is a Fauve-period Vlaminck at his most chromatically explosive. The tugboat, the river, and the banks of the Seine at Chatou are rendered in the violently contrasting colors that defined Fauvism at its peak: reds against greens, blues against oranges, and yellows against violets, applied in bold strokes that make no attempt to describe the local color of the objects depicted. The date of 1906 places this at the height of the Fauve movement, when Vlaminck, Derain, and Matisse were painting together at Chatou and producing the most radical chromatic experiments in the history of Western painting.

Chatou, a suburb northwest of Paris where the Seine flows through a landscape of restaurants, boats, and tree-lined banks, was the birthplace of Fauvism. It was here in 1905-1906 that Vlaminck and Derain produced the paintings that gave the movement its name when a critic at the 1905 Salon d'Automne described them as 'les fauves' (wild beasts). Tugboat on the Seine, Chatou is a direct product of this revolutionary moment—painting that rejects descriptive color in favor of pure chromatic expression.

Tugboat on the Seine, Chatou is Vlaminck at his most Fauve: the violent colors of 1906, applied in bold strokes that describe nothing but their own chromatic intensity. This is the Chatou that gave Fauvism its name—painting so chromatically radical that a critic could only call it wild.