A dealer sends him to beat Monet

In 1906 a 26-year-old French painter named André Derain (1880–1954; pronounced “deh-RANN”) got on a boat to London because a dealer told him to. The dealer was Ambroise Vollard(1866–1939), one of the great talent-spotters of the Paris art trade, the man who had given Cézanne and Picasso early shows and who made his living betting on painters before the rest of the world caught up. This trip was a business decision, not a holiday. Vollard wanted a series of London paintings, and he wanted them from a young man working in the loudest new style in France.

That style was Fauvism (from the French fauves, “wild beasts”): at the Paris Salon of 1905, Derain and his friend Henri Matisse and a few others had hung paintings in colors that did not match the world, faces with green stripes, harbors in pink and turquoise, color chosen for effect instead of accuracy. A hostile critic called them wild beasts, and the name stuck. By 1906 Derain was one of the wild beasts in good standing, and that is exactly why Vollard picked him.

To understand the assignment you have to know what had just happened across town. Claude Monet (1840–1926), the most famous of the Impressionists, had spent years painting the Thames, the Houses of Parliament and the London fog, over and over, the same views under changing light. In the summer of 1904 a big group of those London canvases went on show at the Durand-Ruelgallery in Paris and were a sensation. Everyone who mattered in the Paris art world had just stood in front of Monet’s misty, silvery London and been amazed by it.

So Vollard did the commercially obvious thing: he sent his own young painter to the same river to do it differently. The instruction, in effect, was to go to London, paint the Thames Monet had painted, and come back with something Monet could never have made. Derain went over a couple of stays in this period (sources disagree on whether it was two trips or three, so we will not pretend to know), and he came back with a series. How big a series is itself uncertain, the counts conflict, but the honest shape of it is this: Vollard commissioned dozens of views and Derain delivered around thirty. The painting in front of you is one of them.