A river that exists only in paint
Start with the size, because it surprises people who know the painting only from a screen. This is not a mural. It is about 2 feet 7 inches tall and 3 feet 3 inches wide (the museum’s measurement, an easel-sized oil on canvas in landscape format, wider than it is tall). All of that heat is packed into a picture you could carry under one arm. Now walk into it. Before you sort anything into names, take it in whole: it is warm, the whole lower half glows, and nothing in it is the color London actually is.
Now look at the river across the bottom half of the picture. It is yellow. Not yellow-tinted gray, not yellow where the sun catches it, just yellow, a bumblebee yellow run through with stripes and dots of bubblegum pink and pale burnt-orange, much of it laid straight over the bare off-white canvas so the weave shows through. There is no blue in this river. There is no gray. A real river, on any day, in any weather, gives you some version of blue, green, brown or gray, the colors of water and sky and silt. Derain gives you none of them. He has painted the Thames in colors the Thames does not own, and that single refusal is the whole point of the picture. This is a river that exists only in paint.
Now lift your eye to the sky, the broad band across the top. London is famous for one kind of weather: low gray cloud and fog, the very thing Monet had spent years painting. Here the gray is simply gone. The sky is built from short and long vertical strokes of butter yellow, rose pink and pale orange, with patches of watermelon pink, a warm glow with no hour of the day attached to it and no weather in it at all. There is no fog here because the painting was never about fog. It was about color.
The bridge, the barges, and one true landmark
With the color in your eye, find the structure that holds it together. Across the middle of the picture runs the bridge, the Charing Cross railway bridge, drawn not as modeled ironwork but as a flattened horizontal band laid across the canvas. The architecture is asserted, not described; Derain tells you a bridge is there and refuses to fuss over its rivets. On the colored water below it sit small dark barges and river craft, and they earn their place: they read as dark accents against the pink-and-yellow flood, they give the bridge its scale, and they quietly insist this is a working river, not an abstract pattern.
Then, on the far bank, the one thing that tells you where you are. Among the massed buildings in the distance you can pick out Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, glowing orange and turquoise instead of stone-gray. They are the painting’s single anchor to a real place, the one landmark that turns “a yellow river under a pink sky” back into “London.” Everything else in the picture is color let off its leash; this one cluster of buildings is the leash.
The dot and the patch, at once
One last thing to see, in the handling itself. Look closely at the water and the sky and you will find they are built from separate spots and short dashes of unmixed color sitting side by side, a loosened version of the technique called divisionism (the method of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, who laid down small dots of pure color meant to mix in the viewer’s eye rather than on the palette). Then look at the broader, flatter areas, and that dotting drops away into solid Fauve patches of color. Derain is using two touches at once: the flickering divisionist spot for shimmer, the flat patch for structure. In his hands the strict divisionist dot relaxes into intermittent spots and lines, never quite a system, which is why the surface seems to vibrate between order and freedom.