Vollard’s bet, and where it landed

The London series did what Vollard had paid for it to do, in the long run. Vollard bought the series effectively in its entirety, and over the following decades the individual canvases scattered out into the international art trade, from dealer to collector to dealer, the way a bought-up series does. Today these London paintings are among Derain’s most prized works, and in 2005 and 2006 the Courtauld Gallery in London gathered them for a full exhibition, “André Derain: The London Paintings,” a century after he made them. The young man Vollard had shipped across the Channel had, it turned out, made something that outlasted the dealer who commissioned it.

There is one more thing worth knowing, because it changes how you see the picture. Derain’s wild-beast period was short. Within about two years he had cooled on Fauvism’s pure color entirely, turning toward the more measured, structured painting of Cézanneand the new ideas of Cubism stirring nearby. After the First World War he became one of the leaders of a broad “return to order,” painting careful nudes, portraits and landscapes in a deliberately classical, traditional manner for the rest of his life. The man who burned the Thames pink spent his later decades as one of the more conservative painters of his generation. That is part of what makes this canvas worth standing in front of: it is a high point of a style its own maker treated as a phase and left behind.

The painting itself, meanwhile, had a long and well-traveled life as an object. It went from Derain to Vollard in 1906, and then began a journey through some of the biggest names in the 20th-century art market. The American collector John Quinn, the New York lawyer whose pioneering modern collection helped bankroll the legendary 1913 Armory Show, bought it in 1918. After his estate it probably passed to the Paris dealer Paul Guillaume, then through the London and Paris trade, then to the New York firm Knoedler, and possibly into the collection of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.(the “probably” and “possibly” are the museum’s own honest hedges, kept here on purpose). At the Chrysler sale in New York in February 1950 it changed hands again.

In April 1950 the painting was bought by John Hay Whitney (1904–1982), an American businessman, diplomat and one of the great collectors of his generation. It stayed with him for the rest of his life. In 1982 it was deeded to the John Hay Whitney Charitable Trust and given the same year to the National Gallery of Artin Washington, where it hangs now under the credit line “John Hay Whitney Collection.” Notice the honest gap in this record: the museum publishes no sale prices along the chain, so neither will we. “From the artist to Vollard,” “sold to Whitney,” with no figures attached, is the true account, and inventing francs and dollars to make it sound exact would be a lie dressed up as scholarship.

That is the whole arc, worth stating flat. A dealer’s commercial bet sent a 26-year-old to London to out-paint Monet; the painter came back with a river the color of a sunrise that never happened; the wild-color style that produced it he abandoned within two years; the canvas wandered for forty years through the great collections of two continents; and it ended up on a wall in Washington, where people who have never heard of Ambroise Vollard stand in front of a pink Thames and feel, exactly as Derain wanted, something the real river could never have made them feel.