The Seine at Chatou

A self-taught ex-bicycle-racer squeezing cobalt and vermilion straight from the tube onto a quiet bend of the Seine outside Paris, turning a Sunday-painters’ river town into the highest-pitched landscape of the Fauve year.

1. 1
   The reddish-orange tree trunks

   Rising up the near bank along the left edge of the canvas

   The tree trunks are a frank reddish-orange, a colour no tree wears, chosen for force rather than accuracy. This is the cleanest single proof on the canvas that Vlaminck is using colour as a feeling, not a fact. The Met names the “reddish-orange tree trunks” outright in its own description of this picture, so it is documented, not interpretation.
2. 2
   Paint laid straight from the tube

   Across the whole surface, thickest on the bank and the foliage

   The paint sits in thick, separate touches, what the Met calls “daubs and swirls of pigment,” squeezed on, by its account, directly from the tube. That is impasto, paint heaped so high the brush leaves standing ridges you can read as texture. It is the van-Gogh-style touch: each stroke stays visibly itself instead of blending into its neighbours, so the surface reads as built rather than smoothed.
3. 3
   The boats, a tugboat and sailboats

   Out on the water, the larger dark vessel to the right, a yellow rowboat in the near foreground at lower left

   Out on the Seine sits a remorqueur (the French word for a tugboat) along with sailboats. The Met singles out a small boat in the background painted in blue, red, and white. These are working river craft on a real commercial river, not pleasure boats dressed up for a picture.
4. 4
   A river of broken colour, not a mirror

   The Seine’s surface, opening across the centre of the canvas below the boats and bank

   The water is built from the same short, separate, coloured strokes as the riverbank, so the reflections read as bands of pure colour rather than a smooth mirror. There is no glassy surface here; the river is as worked and as visibly brushed as the land, which keeps the whole picture sitting on one flat, active plane.
5. 5
   The high-key sky

   The upper register, above the trees and the far-bank houses

   The sky is kept light and bright, the “high key” of Fauve painting, meaning colours held near full intensity instead of being darkened or greyed down to imitate distance and air. Nothing in the upper register recedes into a soft haze; the top of the canvas stays as charged as the bottom.
6. 6
   White houses and green leaves at full strength

   The cluster of houses on the far bank and the foliage around them

   The white riverbank houses and the green leaves are the places the Met points to where ordinary local colour is laid on raw and bright. Vlaminck combined the primaries of blue and red with white, the Met writes, using these conventional hues for the white houses, the green leaves, the reddish-orange trunks, and the boat. The whole canvas is a demonstration of pigment used at near-full saturation, a quiet river town painted at the top of its voice.